er, what the heck are these referrers?

[hound_dog]

I have a lot of referrers on whose sites I can see no evidence of them ever having linked to me.

I check out the specific page that is shown as the referrer, and there is never any link to my site. They are often sites that have been mentioned on my user forums, with links to the site - but why are they showing as a referrer to my site?

There are also links like this: [us.f414.mail.yahoo.com,...] which appears to be yahoo mail. Does this mean people are linking to my site from their email?

[ShawnR]

They are people with yahoo email accounts, that are using the web based email client. You or someone sent them email containing your url, and they clicked on it. Could be some advertising that you sent or it could be they are clicking on the web address in your signature at the bottom of your email.

Shawn

[hound_dog]

thanks!

any ideas about the other referrers, who just seem to show up in the stats, but in actual fact have no links whatsoever to my site?

[ShawnR]

Are they using your images?

[hound_dog]

good point, but no.

Its quite likely some of my forum users are linking to images/articles on their sites, though... but why it shows up as a referrer for me, I have no clue.

weird, eh? But others must have noticed odd limks on thir referrers too, can't be the only one having this?

[sugarkane]

Certain browsers have been known to send incorrect referrer details when several windows are open - used to be quite common, to be honest I'm not sure how much of an issue this is nowadays, but it's a possible explanation.

[cfx211]

There are also a ton of different email referrer addresses out there. Hotmail usually is a numeric IP address, a bunch of others have webmail in them. Also I have found that if you submit to one directory, they often repopulate that data on different sites. Zeal for instance gets used by some smaller newspaper sites across the US.