I guess everyone here must check their stats at least once a week (sad people haha). Wondering what's the strangest site(s) that have shown up in your referral logs?
I haven't seen it yet but I thought of it as a rather unique marketing approach: Browse websites of possible clients via referrals you set up which state your contact details in the referring url and also your offering. It could work for SEO, SEM and general advertising services because the only ones who would read it are the webmasters. So in your referrals you could find: [nourl]http://www.acompany.com/limited_offer.html?service=we_offer_fantastic_value_search_engine_marketing&contact=020812345678&ring=now_for_a_quote[/nourl] I don't have a use for it right now but do you reckon a webmaster would actually try it?
As a marketeer you go from that URL I posted to the page of a possible client in the (perhaps wishful thinking) hope the webmaster will pick up on it. It's no cold calling or e-mail spamming, just referrer 'spamming'. Probably too far-fetched to be usefull...
Referrer spamming has brought me many many weird referrers -- even though my web server logs are not publically viewable. It seems that many referrer spammers don't even check for that!
This referrer is my #3 referrer right now: http://batboard.batlabs.com/viewtopic.php I have no idea what that would have to do with my site... I have been seeing some strage ones, which got me to thinking that people do "referrer spam", but what would be the use of that?!
Trying to get backlinks. The fella who uses the hulk as an avatar has an article on his site about this. You can find a reference to the link in one of his posts if you know his userid. I can't remember it; or his website. And; if you search your raw logs for http://batboard.batlabs.com/viewtopic.php it will give you the forum post and then see exactly what they're talking about. It could be they just talking about your site.
a lot of foreign sites link to us, sometimes those can be amusing. we also get a lot of weird SE searches- most of them come from our news comments (since we can't moderate them in real-time). I think our all-time oddest hit was for "fuk children pics."
Here's a link to an old article of mine: http://sarahk.pcpropertymanager.com/blogspam.php I get a lot adult type sites, all hoping I'll give them automated backlinks. This does work, not hard to code but 100% unethical. Sarah
Can't remember the name of the referring site but it had "spanking" in its URL - when I went there, there was a forum where they'd referred to our page on Copyright information - seems that there was some debate going on about "spanking videos" and the like... LOL
My writeup and examples of referrer log spamming might answer some of the questions here ... these guys are definately annoying ...