Connect To Site From

[surfdean]

Hi everyone,

 

On the Awstats page, under "Connect to site from" I have 78% of my traffic coming from "direct address / bookmarks", which is apparently untrackable. I know that there can't be that many people who have bookmarked my site and looking at it, nor do I think it is possible that all these people are typing my URL into their browser. Where else could this traffic be coming from or how else could it be generated?

 

Thanks,

dean

[TweezerMan]

The 'traffic coming from "direct address / bookmarks"' means visitors who request a page from your site but do not send a referer string in the page request. You should be able to tell something about these visits by looking at your server logs, but I'd guess the large number of 'no referer' visits is due to bots visiting your site that are programmed not to send any referer when they retrieve a page from your site.

[surfdean]

The 'traffic coming from "direct address / bookmarks"' means visitors who request a page from your site but do not send a referer string in the page request. You should be able to tell something about these visits by looking at your server logs, but I'd guess the large number of 'no referer' visits is due to bots visiting your site that are programmed not to send any referer when they retrieve a page from your site.

 

Hi David,

 

I hope that I don't have 78% of my traffic from bots... how depressing

 

Aren't the bots tracked in the Robots/Spiders section? There it lists a couple hundred hits, as opposed to thousands of hits... Do that many people block referring pages? Is that a website level block or a browser setting?

 

curiosity...

dean

[TweezerMan]

Aren't the bots tracked in the Robots/Spiders section? There it lists a couple hundred hits, as opposed to thousands of hits... Do that many people block referring pages? Is that a website level block or a browser setting?

Some bots are tracked in AWStats, but the list of UserAgent strings that AWStats recognizes as bots is not even close to being a complete list. If AWStats doesn't recognize the UserAgent, it's not seen as a bot.

 

My experience has been that not that many real live users take the trouble to block referer strings from being sent out. A number of browsers support the ability to modify or block referers sent out, and some personal firewalls can do this as well.

 

There's a number of things that could cause what you're seeing (bots being the most likely to me), but the only way you're going to know for sure is to look at your server logs.