When a referrer does not link to you

The web host for our site tracks where people are coming from, just like most hosts do.

When I look at the logs, I see a total of 12 hits coming from a specific web page. When I go to that page, and even when I view the source for that page, I see absolutely nothing that links to our site. The odd part is that the URL and the page content, and the registered owner of the page in question have nothing to do with our industry and would have no vested interest whatsoever in our organization. The site is in Brazil. The page in question is a review for a GPS system!

So, I thought this was some kind of a fluke and disregarded it. Sure enough, the following month it happened again. Same page. similar number of hits. Still nothing on the page that links to our site, or our IP address or anything like that.

Does this sound familiar to anyone? I can provide the URL, but did not want to post it in the thread.

I noticed the same thing when I was looking at the logs for my wife's site earlier this week... Brazilian site with GPS reviews. 10 visits on July 7 with hostname, "www.web.com"

Very odd

While it could be something else, it is generally log file spam or referrer spam. The spammer sends hits to other sites in hopes they will see them and come visit their site. There are a number of programs that are sold to make this easy and I have a copy of one I bought a long time ago.

As you may think, it's pretty ineffective at best, and at worst it can eat up some of your bandwidth. Just imagine several thousand people doing this over and over to your site. In most cases it's not a real problem, just a bother. But if it gets to be too much or you just hate it, you can look up who the hosting provider is for the site and report them.

ISPs hate this, because it generates a lot of useless traffic for them and is clearly against their terms of service.