Referral Links N/A

[WebDude911]

Hi Webmaster World,

I am wondering if people have come across referral links pointing to them, but when you search the referring site, you cannot find any reference in the code to the link. Any thoughts?

Thanks!

-WebDude

[jonrichd]

For the purposes of this reply, I'm assuming that you saw a referring link in your logs, and went back the referring site to see what the context of the link was, and who was linking to you. If that isn't the case, you'll need to be a little clearer as to what the situation is.

I can think of a few possible explanations. The first is that the referring site doesn't actually link to you, but is trying a well known technique of trying to build links for themselves.

Some webmasters put their logs (or results from log reporting tools) in a location where they can be spidered by search engines. Since referring sites are typically a component of these reports, and appear as normal <a=> links, they provide a backlink to the sites.

A similar case exists for many blog sites, where the blogger autoposts a list of the most recent referring sites (there's some software that will do this for them). Since the blogs are likely to be hit by a spider, the pretend-referral sites hope to be on the list when the spiders come by.

There's also some spider (can't remember its name now) that will crawl your site, and list as the referrer the last site it was at, which typically will be related, but won't have a link to you.

The final reason I could think of is that the link could be hidden from sight, only visible when viewing the page source. I wouldn't expect to find this on a link to you unless you knew about it, but I've seen it done when a webmaster controls a bunch of sites, and wants to form a PR passing network without making the links visible to human visitors. The links will he hidden in 1 pixel gifs, or in an off the page positioned division.

Hope this helps.

[WebDude911]

Jon,

This is pretty helpful and you were correct my question was in regards to log file referrers. It is very interesting that these sites are looking for referral traffic from someone's web stats page. It doesn't appear as if this page, however, is allowed to be viewed by the spiders per the Robots file. But hey whatever works I guess. I checked the text links on the referring site, but did not see an HRef text link pointing to the original site. I will see if there is a pixel with link (or blog) as you indicated.

Thanks!

-WebDude