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Referrals from Webmasterworld.com

         

philaweb

10:47 am on May 5, 2005 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



For some odd reason one of my websites has gotten five referral visits from Webmasterworld within the last 12 hours. Funny thing though - I have never disclosed an URI to this website at Webmasterworld. The referrals all stems from a "Compose Reply Message" page of different topics.

Can anyone explain to me what is happening, thanks?

philaweb

12:48 pm on May 5, 2005 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Well, I have analyzed the data and must say the result is interesting.

It seems like the referrals comes from the prefetched copies of the Google Accellerator. All referral visits have a proxy IP = 72.14.192.6

So, not the problem of Webmasterworld.

How on earth does Google Accellerator combine the "Compose Reply Message" pages with my website?

benihana

12:55 pm on May 5, 2005 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



<speculation> is your site the one with the same name as your user name?

could it be recognising that as a domain and appending .com to it for the prefetch? the computational overhead would surely be huge... but cannot see any other reason for it..</speculation>

unless, you dont have anything referencing your site in the custom code insert in the control panel, do you?

philaweb

1:03 pm on May 5, 2005 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



~benihana

As far as your speculation - no. The website URI and my Webmasterworld nick has nothing in common.

As far as control panel - no. I have never disclosed any URI to a website of mine.

maccas

1:18 pm on May 5, 2005 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Many moons ago Brett was log spamming everyone for searchengineworld, wonder if he is up to his old tricks :) .. that is how I found out about this site.

Brett_Tabke

1:24 pm on May 5, 2005 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Administrator 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



> The referrals all stems from a "Compose
> Reply Message" page of different topics.

You running the new accelerator?
[webmasterworld.com...]

Nice FUD maccas. Did you even read what Phil had said?

If you are and did see referrals from SEW, it is the same thing as before in 2000-2001:
[webmasterworld.com...]
[searchengineworld.com...]
We also did run a data bot for awhile in 99 to analyze link structure. It did honor bots.txt and disclosed that it was from sew. One of the perks was the referrals we got, however, that was not the purpose as you are talking about maccas. When it became about log spamming as they do it today - we stopped like all the other good ones.

Brett_Tabke

1:34 pm on May 5, 2005 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Administrator 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



> How on earth does Google Accellerator combine
> the "Compose Reply Message" pages with my website?

Tis the nature of proxies and IE, that referrals will be radically screwed up. The browser does not know which page it is actually on - the content and the uri can become disassociated.

I would guess, that at some point in your surf stream path, you visited your own home page. Then you posted some stuff on WebmasterWorld. So, somewhere you have WebmasterWorld compose a reply in your browser, and you have your homepage in your browser. You either back or forward buttoned, and the proxy checked the cache and didn't update. The last "new" page that couldn't be refreshed was the noncacheable WebmasterWorld compose reply form.

My best guess the click stream was like this:

1- you visit your page. (cacheable)
g proxy caches the page.
2- you visit a thread. (noncacheable)
3- you click compose/reply. (noncacheable)
4- you reply. (noncacheable)
5- you type in or click on your own homepage url. (which should be cacheable, but given that it is a proxy/browser combo at work...)
6- the browser sends a referring string to your homepage and then forces a cache update. aka: you just got a referral from WebmasterWorld.

philaweb

1:48 pm on May 5, 2005 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



~brett

Thanks for your explanation.

I think the referral could be from me having two browser windows open when composing an answer. One window with Webmasterworld and the other with my website.

The scary part is that informations jumps and are kept for others when Google does the prefetching of a page.

The accellerator stays uninstalled. ;)

maccas

1:49 pm on May 5, 2005 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Sorry for insinuating that you use to log spam Brett, it was meant to be taken with a grain of salt that you would be doing it now.

And for clearing up why you were sending these spiders out. At the time I was new to log files and webdesign and I was pickling my brains trying to figure out where my link was.