In my opinion, one of the most interesting aspects of analytical software such as Pmetrics would have to be the referral logs. Referral logs store important data which allows you to determine how someone happens to come across your web site. So far, I’ve seen a wide assortment of referrals, mostly from some variation of Google. But I’ve also had the privilege to discover a referral site called Link River where someone who had an account within that site was sharing my content across the network. I think that would make any blogger feel pretty good.
Outside of the usual suspects, I’ve only come across a few interesting and unique ways of stumbling across my blog. For instance, not too long ago, I received a referral from the StumbleUpon demo page rather than the site itself. Another site I discovered through my referrals called EasySearch is a search engine based in the U.K. which takes the best of the Yahoo!, Microsoft and Ask.com search engines and puts them together to be accessed from one location.
Those are just some of the places I’ve discovered thanks to my referral logs. Referrals serve as an excellent source of information in terms of figuring out where your audience is hanging out and sharing your content amongst themselves.
Regardless if you use Pmetrics or not, what are some of the coolest or most unique ways in which a browser has stumbled across your blog?
13 thoughts on “What Is The Most Unique Referral You’ve Ever Seen”
I use awstats to check for this locally, but also the tool backlinkwatch.com which will show tons of places that are linking to you with what text (seems more updated than yahoo inlinks). I saw a ton of places I didn’t even know about linking in. It’s kind of crazy how things propagate across the internet.
Sometimes I notice weird keywords in awstats that I didn’t even target that I am people are landing on for me from search engines. Kind of weird stuff you find when you start to analyze the logs
App, that sounds like an awesome discovery. I have seen posts which have been linked to but I can not gain access to where the link was published. The curiosity also kills me!
One of my sites (not a blog) receives a lot of traffic from a password protected area of a university website, in which a professor has posted resources for one of his courses.
That same site also receives traffic from a private forum with a focus on student productivity, in which one must pay a hefty fee for access to the content.
I seriously wish I could have access to both of these, to see what they are saying about my product. The curiosity is killing me.
More interesting than referral info is something I found about a year ago in my server logs: Someone using an Amiga visited one of my sites.
That’s pretty rare. I never had that happen before. I know they say that some people still use Amigas, but up until that happened, I had never seen any actual proof of it.
That’s better than an Elvis sighting, if you ask me.
A Stumbleupon user “Rocky Tiger King” (http://rocky-tiger.stumbleupon.com/ – currently “under review”) just a week or so after receiving some spam with that name in it.
Rast, I actually have a success story that is somewhat similar to yours. I ended up being one of the first to comment on a story on Lifehacker.com and because I posted a link to one of my blog posts which was highly relevant to the Lifehacker post, I ended up receiving a ton of traffic that day, all through a comment. I’ll never forget that day!
Hmm, have you tried to visit the specific forum threads to figure out the context in which your website was shared? Strippers and candy sounds pretty kinky!
I have small but consistent stream of visitors with referral from one blog post where I had made a comment. It’s not really great useful comment and it’s not really high in thread (I was ninth to comment)… Totally puzzles me what people see in it that they get urge to visit my blog.
I had a bunch of links from a stripper forum (a forum where strippers hang out). Thought that was kinda weird. Also links from a bodybuilding forum and a football forum. All linked to my candy blog.
Now, why didn’t I think of that?! Good idea Ryan!
I used to keep track by having this hokey referral script on all of my sites .. where I can see the links for the past “X” days .. (e.g. 365 days http://petlvr.com/blog/refer/index.php?glimpse=365 ) but, there is a problem if you use the Wp-Super-Cache plugin – it’s about 10% accurate with all the caching, so I don’t rely on it at all. I used to though.
After reading your comment Ryan, I just had one of those Duh moments which begs the question, Why didn’t I think of that? That is a great point you’ve made and I think it’s time for me to start making a list as well.
Definitely go have a look through your logs and report back on some of your findings.
The most unique referral I ever got was a search which is so horrific it should not be repeated. Seriously.
But, getting to the point of this post, I keep a running list of referrals that send more than 100 visitors in any given day. That list which is now up to 56 sites has become my starting point for all online promotion.
This is a really interesting topic. I have not ever really thought talking about something like this. I’ll have to think on this one but the one you brought up has never happened to me.
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