Trellian - Competitive Intelligence

Understanding the link intelligence report

[Coco99]

Does anyone understanding where Trellian takes the "referer data" to tell us which site is referring trafic to competitors? They offer a report that they call "link intelligence" that we find very interesting but we would like to know exactly where the raw data is coming from.

Thanks!

[oxbaker]

all server side programs liek asp.net or php contain what is called a HttpContext class.
in this class you can get several bits of info about the users of your site. One being the Refererer (the site they were at before coming to yours) This is a standard and can be trusted.

mcm

[gregbo]

The HTTP referrer cannot be trusted because it can be faked. Some browsers even allow the user to set the HTTP referrer to whatever they want.

[oxbaker]

that is not completely true, referrers are hardly ever faked. User agents get faked but referrers are generally accurate.

[Coco99]

Thanks,

But what if this is the site of a competitor and we don't have access to the logs on the server? Trelian says that with their "link intelligence report" they can give us the referers of the wesite of a competitor.

Any ideas where the data may be coming from since they can't have access to all the servers in the world? May be coming from routers, isp, search engines?

Cheers to all!

[gregbo]

that is not completely true, referrers are hardly ever faked. User agents get faked but referrers are generally accurate.

I doubt that. In any event, that does not mean the referrer can be trusted. Anytime data can be easily faked, it cannot be trusted. And the referrer can be (and is) easily faked. A popular example is the log spam people have mentioned here in the past. Fraudsters fake the referrer to get it to show up on sites that make their access logs public in order to drive up their SE rankings.