"No Referrer" visits in top referring sites

who exactly does this refer to

[loggerhead]

Hi,

The "no referrer" figure is consistently the top referring site in my clients logfile reports.

In general most web analysis software explain this figure as those visitors who typed the url of the site into the address bar or accessed the site through a bookmark. Therefore you could associate this figure with some offline marketing activity.

However I never feel really confident reporting this to a client as i believe the "no referrer" figure could also consist of visits through email signatures, text newsletters or that the visitors browser is not passing referrer information to the clients web server.

Does anyone have anything more concrete on this figure or experienced unusual trends with it.

Thanks

Loggerhead

[Brett_Tabke]

If you have an inordinate amount of them, I would pull up the raw log files and make sure they are being recorded properly.

There are also other reasons that referrers wouldn't be sent:

- Some browsers can be set to turn them off (opera)
- Proxy's can filter them.
- Personal proxy filters.
- Filtering software.
- Secure pages.

[Edge]

I've noticed the same pattern in my refferals. Typically, I see about 45% "no refferer" in my stats.

[skibum]

Visits from bookamrk files?

[Everyman]

Bots don't use referrers -- 100 percent of professional bots and 99 percent of amateur bots. Only really screwed up amateur bots send referrers.

Just because your user-agent doesn't look like a bot, doesn't mean that it isn't a bot. In fact, an empty referrer is a pretty good clue that it's a bot. Another good clue is that it's skipping the images. The user-agent is probably the least reliable clue for amateur bots.

Links from inside Java applets don't send referrers either, but that's probably under one percent. Don't know about Flash, JavaScript, or other stuff.

But it's the bots that make the big numbers. There are too many useless bots out there. I'm running about 4 bots for every mouse click from a live person on my sites, for those who come into the site initially (i.e., deleting intra-site referrers from the total).

Time to scrap the Web and start over.