Strange Blank Referrers In Tracking Stats

[finnegan]

I'm running a Clickbank Aff URL through my tracking software and then that link through a software like Sniply. Testing the link, I not only see my own IP and referrer showing in the stats, I see blank referrers and different IPs showing up originating from strange locations. This happened with another software like Sniply called Back.ly.

Any idea what's going on here? Also, can a service like Sniply track my snips to see where I'm posting them?

 

[CCarter]

Yes they can; just like you can see websites sending you referring traffic, they can see the websites sending traffic to their links.

 

[finnegan]

Ok, I thought so.

Anybody know why I'm seeing blank referrers coming from these links? Is this some bot from the URL shortener service that is clicking the link itself to see the entire path of that link?

 

[Ryuzaki]

I've not used these types of URL shorteners before but I can venture a guess.

Here's an analogy that I am familiar with: ghost host spam in Google Analytics. These bots only want to appear in your referrer traffic so that webmasters look at the list and think "hmm, I wonder why they are sending me traffic, let me go look." And then they get sold on whatever thing it is that company is selling, and their target demographic is webmasters.

But what they do is randomly generate Analytics ID's and ping them. They don't actually visit the site or get referred from anywhere. So the way to sniff them out is to see what traffic didn't originate from your own domains or any other valid domain (and block them from messing with your analytic #'s).

I imagine these URL shorteners generate random strings of text and numbers to use as the temporary URLs. So someone could be running random sequences to pull the same stunt. Or they are crawling the web to find all the URLs and then going back and "pinging" them without visiting. That would hide the host. But they could just be visiting them direct as well, which would result in "no referrer." And the strange locations is likely a giant public proxy scrape.