Phantom Referrals

[miguelito]

I ran the firefox referral on my site but cancelled it about 8 months ago.

According to Google, i get about 50 page impressions a day for firefox and a conversion today giving me 25 cents!

I've checked my server logs and there is nothing there i forgot to remove.

Surely 50 people a day can't be viewing a cached page from april!

Anybody else seen this twilight zone wierdness?

[ken_b]

It's unlikely, but possible, that someone scraped your page and included the referal link when they posted the scraped content to their site.

I've had the clicks from cache experience and it usually ends after a week or so.

BUT............... that depends on how often your page gets crawled and a new cache gets generated. On a page that gets crawled very seldom, a few months might not be out of line.

All that said, I'd take another look through your site and double check for a forgotten link because 50 impressions a day from a cached version of a seems high, at least to me.

[miguelito]

it does seem high but it can't be a slow bot crawling thing as my site gets crawled at least once a day!

[fredw]

An old version of your site in the Internet Wayback Machine?

[joelgreen]

Some surfers could save your old pages locally. I often save pages with data which could be needed more than once (or if i find it interesting and would like to read later).

Do you have any "localhost" or "127.0.0.1" referrers in log file / stat tracking program?

[plasma]

Maybe a bookmark with a session id?