Mysterious referrals

Mysterious referrals from a competitor of ours

[namniboose]

I have noticed the url of one of our competitors as a referrer to our website.

There is no link (that I can see) from the page in question so I am wondering what is going on.

Any ideas?

[Key_Master]

Cloaking??? Or maybe he's just falsifying his referrer strings (easy to do).

[namniboose]

Can you explain what you mean, Key Player?

[namniboose]

Whoops!

[little_bits]

I get several referrals like that too and when I follow the referral, I cannot find a link to my site anywhere. They aren't competitors. One in particular keeps showing up as a referral from an on-topic site to mine but there isn't a link anywhere. Any other explanations?

[digitalghost]

Multiple browser windows being open? There's a glitch sometimes with multiple windows being open. Your competitor might have two or three browser windows open (one for his site) checking what else? The competition, and it might show up in your logs as a referral.

DG

[namniboose]

Wow that's weird. There were 15 referrals last month from that page.

We do network with them but they are still competitors! Is it likely that would happen 15 times?!

[Travoli]

It's also fun to watch your newsletter list for competitors' e-mail addresses.

and then send them a "special version" of the newsletter

[dvduval]

I had this happen one time...
Then I realized they were just referencing pictures on my site (until I renamed them!)

[Bogglesworld]

Very strange. I have also had as many as 18 mystery referals from a page that had no links to mine. And several other cases with four or five. I have also been puzzled by this phenomena for about two months. Digital ghost's explanation sounds reasonable but not for 18 referals from one page. Hmmmm.

[namniboose]

Same here - 15 referrals in 1 month?