Yahoo Referals appearing as "direct" or no referer

Very important issue with Yahoo

[canadaeh]

When searchers do a search from the Yahoo directory, the hyperlink address begins with http:srd.yahoo.com and ends with the the listings web site url. Do a search at [search.yahoo.com...] for "games" and you'll see what I mean. Mouse over one of the links and you'll see that hyperlink address.

Now, it seems to me that your log files would not record this as a Yahoo search referal because Yahoo may not be identifying itself as the referer. It would appear to us as a direct referal as though the person just typed the web site url into their browser address box.

Does this mean we're getting hundreds of referals from Yahoo that we don't know about? Is there any way we can identify Yahoo (it's ip address? Does anyone know their IP address) when it delivers a visitor to us from the directory.

Yahoo's srd.yahoo.com ip address is 64.58.76.85. Can Webtrends identify this as srd.yahoo.com?

Please help!

[msr986]

Although Y! has redirect URLs in their SERP, The redirection script reports the correct referrer page. This means that all of the web stats packages should report the Y! directory correctly.

[spinnercee]

I would add that the srd.yahoo.com redirect is in fact an http redirect, so it should always pass the referrer info to your server... More important to you, however, is that MS-IE, in particular has a highly visible user pref that is cloaked as "make browsing more anonymous" that will cause the browser to not send any referral information at all -- that is something to be concerned about.

Overall, I believe that Yahoo! uses the redirector to track click-throughs on it's search results, and I also wouldn't be surprised if that is factored into page ranking. Does Google do this was well? I doubt it...

anyways... Hello everyone :) cjw