i was looking at some referrer stats and saw something very interesting there are a hand full of sites on there that apparently send traffic over to my site (it was all 1 visitor from each source in this circumstance) but when i would view their site, i would see NO link or reference to my site at all. it's not like they had links and deleted it either, because one was my main competitor and i know he would never put a link to my site on his main page. any ideas why im getting this?
I personally believe this is caused by site scrapers or just improper reporting from Google Analytics. Do you type your website directly or use bookmarks to return to your website when viewing your competitors?
Sometimes, it happens not even by Google Analytics but also from other Stats counters like Awstats...A referrer site is there in the stats, but if we actually like to find out the link over their on that website, we can't find it.
someone may have your site in their bookmarks or type in the url manually.. they have another site open, then select your site in their bookmarks.. analytics on your site will see the previous site they were looking at was that other site and therefor assumes it has a link to your site..
even i used to get such referrals and when i visited them i couldn't find any link over there so i would also like to have a answer at that
It's called referral spam and your site is targetted because you have, or have had public traffic stats. That or they are pinging anyone and everyone. I've had some really funny sites doing it but in general they're porn sites. The purpose is to have your site linking back to them - either because your stats are open and every hit is crawled by Googlebot et al or because you list the "top 10 referrers" on your homepage. The coding involved is very simple and it can be set up in minutes using Curl. If you are having to report the stats to anyone else then just cull the obvious misfits. Don't waste your time trying to block them. Here's an ancient blog post of mine: http://www.itamer.com/referral-spam/55