Mystery of Referring Site Report

hundreds of hits referred by page with no link to my website

[KeithDouglas]

My webhost offers a "stats" program that shows a number of measures of requests, etc. One of them is the "Referring Site Report"

Week after week one of the top referring sites is a motorcycle dealership (which has nothing to do with the topic of my website). I've looked at their pages several times (including the souce code) and I haven't seen any link to or mention of my website.

Any idea what's going on here?

[moishe]

pretty common question here, lots of threads on it, just run a search for log spamming

[KeithDouglas]

Thanks, I am unfaimilar with the term and will look into it.

[anthonyon]

Out of curiousity: Have you been advertising your site lately? Specifically, have you ordered, purchased, received, or dealt with any traffic exchangers, hit generators, or anything of the likem maybe a free signup that you weren't aware of?

Usually when a third-party company generate hits to a site (like yours) they use a fake hit generator (bots) and the referring URL of those hits are from another company or site.

Hope this helps!

[KeithDouglas]

Have you been advertising your site lately? Specifically, have you ordered, purchased, received, or dealt with any traffic exchangers, hit generators, or anything of the like maybe a free signup that you weren't aware of?

No. I take a strict "if-you-build-it-they-will-come" approach. But, if I'm not aware of it, then I'm not aware of it.

It's a two-month old 'site. I had not yet password protected the stats (which are accessible by just adding "/stats" to the root URL). I password protected them just an hour ago.