No referrer url

what are the possible causes

[shasan]

What would cause referrer logs not to log the referring URL?

Just wondering, I have many visits without referring url's and it's hard for me to believe they all just typed in my domain right off the bat.

thx in advance.
shasan.

[Hannu]

You might want to check this thread covering the issue:

[webmasterworld.com...]

/Hannu

[chewy]

Hannu,

Forum39/696 is an excellent summary -- circa late 2002.

Thanks for the link - and the chance for a bump!

Please, this topic deserves a more recent look...

It would seem to me that the fuzz factor of log analysis may be increasing - pretty much across the board.

Has anyone who posted back then got anything that they want to further contribute?

Are folks seeing more or fewer "no referrers" now in '04?

Are any of the key points summarized by Brett and others increasing or decreasing?

[bill]

Well...I surf with Opera and have the referrer option turned off. There are also a number of Internet privacy programs out there that will do this as well...

[Yidaki]

Most of the empty referers i get have one thing in common: the requests are coming too fast to be done manually and in masses per ip. -> My sites are visited my an increasing number of "pirate bots" stealthed as the most common MSIE/Win user agents and running under the biggest dial up account ip's (aol, t-online) so it's hard to impossible to filter and block them. This night i had 10 of these spiders falling into my trap within half an hour. I usually catch 5 to 15 of such bots per day.

[shasan]

interesting. The no referrer visits in my logs look and act like normal surfers. You can tell when it's a bot... at least I thought I could.

[Hannu]

Please, this topic deserves a more recent look...

Well, yes and no. I still think the basic problems covered in the thread remain. However, as Bill says:

Well...I surf with Opera and have the referrer option turned off. There are also a number of Internet privacy programs out there that will do this as well...

I'll second that there's are more possibilities of protecting online privacy and naturally this will affect the no referrer numbers. But, I don't think the average internet user is aware of that.

/Hannu