odd google referrer in my logs

[ryan19]

In the referring logs for one of my sites I have a few hundred hits from 2 IP #'s like this: [216.239.37.120...]

When I paste the Ip into a browser it goes to google.com...

What exactly is this?

[taxpod]

Nothing unusual about this. I alwasy get Google referrals from IP addresses. But I'm not sure why this is.

[rogerd]

Looks like one of their language tranlation things.

[Chris_R]

I've always assumed it is what rogerd says.

They click on the link that says "translate this page".

[mbauser2]

I alwasy get Google referrals from IP addresses. But I'm not sure why this is.

Google doesn't have a normal reverse DNS setup for the servers used for the cache or the translator, so referrals from cached/translated pages are number-only.

(It's easy to miss this fact on the translator, because the translation appears in a frameset. The framing page has a name; the framed page containing the results doesn't. Break out of the framset, and you'll see the "translate_c" in the URI.)

[Chris_R]

Ahh - the framset thing s what confused me - as I would always see the url as well - and always get the ip in my logs.

"URI"

I will never say it :) I don't care what it supposed to be - it just sounds weird.

[ciml]

That's a nice idea mbauser2, but it would be very unusual to use RDNS for the 'referer' log. It's the browser's 'Referer' header that's used for that, RDNS can be used for the reports such as domain and organisation.

When you click 'translate', you get a frameset which has a src of an address in the translate.google.com domain.

<meta http-equiv="refresh"
content="0;URL=http://216.239.37.120/translate_c?
hl=en&amp;u=http://www.yourdomain.com/">

What ryan19 is seeing in his logs is this 'Referer' when the browser is loading images, external CSS, etc.

Chris, I just say "Uri Geller" without the "Geller".