I recently had someone complaining that their stats for referrals from splut (he's not a paying customer) are 'odd' in that they show lots of visitors from the same IP addresses and all the visitors are shown as being from IE4 on Win98.
Now, the IP address thing isn't as much of an issue to me as it is to him - I sit on our server (my own site) a lot and see the same IP address coming in and visiting from the same search engine link.
But it may be related to the problem with the Win98 IE4 thing - seems odd that all of his visitors are shown as this when coming from Splut but not from anywhere else.
Two of the most used IP addresses are 65.26.127.87
and
198.107.58.133
Now i'm not a techy and never will be (we didn't build the techy end of Splut)but does anyone have an explanation for this?
Have any of you got sites listed with Splut and see the same thing?
It seems odd that none of the paying customers have complained - I certainly would if I was paying for what I thought were false hits.
The customer seems to think that Splut has some sort of automated 'visit-bot' generating false hits, which I know for a certain isn't happening.
The only people that have complained are this customer (and he claims that some of HIS clients have complained)
The stats are from a variety of tracking software, and he claims he has looked at the raw logs.
He also claims that when HE visits his site from Splut, the headers show up correctly.
Help? I don't really need abusive rude and offensive ICQ messages from this guy first thing in a mornign anymore!! :(
Splut has never struck me as being particularly well behaved and I can kind of understand your clients's problems.
I have a couple of sites listed in Splut and the referrals which come are often tortuously long- 200+ characters listing the asp session, webtrends ID and a whole chunk of garbage. All come from www.splut.com/cgibin/visit.cgi. Sometimes these will have hints of the search term such as MT but even when these are included often it is only the index code (i.e. none of the graphics are called) which is hit suggesting that it was not a real referral. Most of the time there is no clue as to why the page is hit.
Like you I don't have a tech POV on this. Is it possible that every time a search is performed on splut and your site is listed, it sends a referral to a site- even if it is not clicked on by the user?
As for IP addresses, I see clusters of the same IP in short spaces of time but no long term trend- perhaps supporting the above theory.
The bottom line is that when I see referrals from splut. I take them with a large pinch of salt, very rarely do they seem to be real users.
(edit typo)
Hi Vis, welcome to WmW.
It seems strange that someone would "complain" about referals when they are coming in for free.
Both IP addresses are US ISPs which also offer webhosting. There are a number of possibilities.
They could be click throughs from websites hosted at the ISPs.
They could be click throughs from banner or link exchange.
Perhaps someone else has an idea.
I checked some logs here and I could not find ANY referals from splut to verify this.
Vis, you'd get calls for html only and no graphics loading when a surfer has the graphics option switched off.
re. browser with graphics turned off. Possible but when that happens with 25 splut referrals last month it seems unlikely.
Anyway it seems my initial supposition was true, I've run a few tests and it is indeed the case that splut pays your website a visit when it comes up in the search results- even if the searcher does not then click on your site.
You can replicate this by searching for a term your site can be found under and then checking your logs. In one case my IP address came up when searching for the site's name with a reasonably clean referral from index.cgi. In the second case an unfamiliar IP (traced back to a number of undistinctive domains) came up when selecting the category the site was listed in. The referral for this was full of the usual asp, webtrends ID junk.
It seems that the only way you can know if it is a true referral is when more elements of the page are loaded such as graphics and/or the user moves on to other pages. Such is the trickle of referrals that come from splut that I wouldn't worry about it too much Severina (though you might have thought that they might have bunked your site up a little higher if they were your client.) You are however going to have to break the news to your client.
It sounds like a link checker to me, but if he is getting charged for the clicks. eek.
awork006039.netvigator.com - - [02/Feb/2001:02:27:21 -0500] "GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 19085 "http://www.splut.com/cgibin/visit.cgi" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.01; Windows 98)"
195.224.88.34 - - [02/Feb/2001:08:38:33 -0500] "GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 19085 "http://www.splut.com/cgibin/visit.cgi" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.01; Windows 98)"
194.151.221.90 - - [02/Feb/2001:08:36:05 -0500] "GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 19085 "http://www.splut.com/cgibin/visit.cgi" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.01; Windows 98)"
and so on. Nothing more than a single hit (like a link checker) but 4 or 5 a day every day.
Twas me who was a little hard on Nikki regarding Splut, Nikki didn't mean to be rude sorry for being a little to abrasive but!
I have spent a fair bit of money with one of Spluts other entity’s UK banners and this automatically made me very suspicious.
The reason for my anger is simple, I'm pretty sure Splut knows about these false referrers whether they are actually generating them themselves or whether this is simply bad technical design (I think not)
I had spent the week advising my customers about the importance of a listing in Splut.
Only then to receive lots of complaints saying the hits were fake.
Nikki it was only last week that I enquired about a paid positioning on Splut and you informed me that you were receiving over 100 referrers per day on a site was positioned top. If I were you I would be pretty angry as well, thats false advertising ?
Lets get some reaction from the owners of splut.
May be all-current paying customers of Splut would be interested in this discussion?
And just one final point, I have 3 sites listed in splut currently that all generate Business daily and that Splut is in the Top 3 refferrers, I do not know of a single sale that has ever arisen from a Splut referrer.
Stuart
I am new to this - but I think I am being mislead.
I am not in any way technical - I am marketing and just own the web site.
I have a web site with lots of SPLUT hits - usually two or three per day - NO ONE STAYS - ONLY ONE PAGE VIEW PER VISIT - surely this must be done by a robot to make SPLUT look good.
I think this is very bad and such 'robots' should not be allowed - it falsifies the hits. How can this type of this be stopped.
Thanks in advance for your advice & help
Mike
Stu, you say about the importance of a listing in Splut, why do you feel this am I missing something here.
I have several clients that are listed in splut but most of the refferrals they get come from either Yahoo/freeserve/lycos/msn/ask normally in that order.
