UK Referring Sites Traffic

[WW MemberName]

So over the past two weeks, I’ve been using Hitslink to monitor our web traffic. Below is the list of referring sites.

Bookmark or direct 19.89%
[uk.search.yahoo.com...] 13.76%
[google.co.uk...] 10.73%
Other 10.14%
http_//uk.pureprofile.com/clicks/resultsfull.asp 6.95%
[search.orange.co.uk...] 3.71%
[google.com...] 2.98%
[pagead2.googlesyndication.com...] 2.19%
http_www.2006-deals.com/directory.php 2.00%
http_216.133.243.28/2.php (findology Interactive Media) 1.39%
[search.yahoo.com...] 1.19%

So my question is can anyone provide details on the following:

Bookmark or direct? I can not envision 20% of our referring traffic is from someone typing in our address, or bookmarked. Any ideas where this traffic comes from?

Other? What possible is other?

Uk.pureprofile.com Any ides what this is?

Search.orange.co.uk? What is the quality of Orange searches?

www.2006-deals.com? Again what is the quality of this?

Findology? What is this?

Any input will be appreciated.

Thanks,

[edited by: IanTurner at 6:38 pm (utc) on Sep. 3, 2006]
[edit reason]
[1][edit reason] unlinked - potential problem sites [/edit] [/edit][/1]

[IanTurner]

Orange traffic is high quality it is all home user ISP driven stuff from default settings.

They recently took over wanadoo and all the wanadoo search traffic is now coming from the orange URL

See this thread for more background
[webmasterworld.com...]

[le_gber]

bookmark or direct might also be that they come from a search engine but they have a firewall setting that prevent referrer information to be passed on.

at least I think it might :)

[WW MemberName]

Hi le_gber,
Thanks for the input. So if your take is correct, I might have close to 20% of my traffic coming from search engines that block their referrer information? That can’t be good. Can I assume if they block their referrer information, they are probably not quality search engine traffic?

Just trying to get to the bottom of all the traffic we get from search engines.

Thanks,

[le_gber]

searh engines or other websites linking to yours. None will show in your logs if the visitors block referers.

The referrer blocking is the visitors' privacy concerns so doesn't have an impact in terms of quality.

[WW MemberName]

Hi le_gber,
Thanks for responding. Our goal is to identify the traffic that is deemed poor, bad, or better yet commission-less traffic. The logs do help us identify the traffic, with the exception of the traffic that is "bookmark or direct" and "blockedReferrer".

This does represent 20% of this month's traffic. We probably do not have return traffic via a bookmark or direct, so the "bookmark or direct" traffic is still a mystery.

We have PPC through Overture, and it has been expressed by a number of forum members that this traffic does have problems.

Thanks again....

[JKMitchell]

On some of the sites I run we get as high as 70% of visitors with no referrer.

It seems that Norton Internet Security and Zone Alarm are likely to be the biggest causes (at least when I tested things back in March).

Makes a mockery of trying to track where visitors come from but it's all traffic and if the visitor or the company wants to block referrer information that's up to them.

Cheers

John

[edited by: JKMitchell at 8:07 pm (utc) on Sep. 12, 2006]