Is this a marketing strategy?

Whenever I look at my refers to my sites, there are a lot who I never linked with or anything. And they are sending loads of visitors to my site, but when I check their site, I can't find a link on their website. What's up with this?

 

Are they scrapper sites? If so, the links may have been there for awhile and now they aren't.

 

It could be that they're hotlinking stuff from your site and that's why they're in your referrers stats ... take a look at their code instead of just the website or pages.

 

I have this issue with myspace sites linking to our fansite images. Good luck

 

Adsense? Coop?

Or referral spam of course.

 

I had this with a few sites, they hot linked a load of images for some tutorial so i changed the images to advertise my site

 

I just found an ad for software that spams server logs. They assume if you see referrers in your logs you will go to site to find your link. Can't remember what it's called but that may be the scoop. They advertise thousands of visitors to your site type crap. I get lots of this in my logs too and can never find a link.

 

I have this as well and i have always wondered what was going on. Thanks for shedding some light on it.

 

That would answer something for me too, I found some pretty dubious sites which my logs said were referring traffic to me. I went to a couple to see if they had added a link for some strange reson and I couldnt find one.

Was gonna ask the question on here if it continues, but looks like that would be the answer.

 

Scrapers or adsenses usually. Your link appear there sometimes and sometimes it doesn't.

 

If they do that though doesnt it increase your link popularity

 

This is called referal log spam and it's a very common blackhat SEO trick.

The idea is to have a script that sends tonnes of hits to different websites in hopes of being listed high up in their server stats page. This serves two purposes:

1. Curious webmaster clicks through to view their website.
2. Careless webmasters make their webstats viewable to the world, therefore Google & other SEs INDEX the webstats pages and in the process index the link created by the referal stats, ie. FREE BACKLINK.

This is a really old trick.

 

You should use a web analytics program like google analytics and within this look at those with no referrer. Take a close look at two things.

1. how long did those with no referrer stay and how many page views avg. per visit.

2. Look at segmenting your traffic to see what % of visitors spend less than 5 seconds on your site. This will clue you into junk traffic sites.