Sven Slootweg's Blog

A pretty surprising sight I’ve seen on my statistics today. I’m using StatCounter, a free statistics service, that hasn’t let me down for the past few years even a sigle time. However, today I found a few very weird and interesting entries in my pageview history.

The above screenshot is slightly edited, to hide the non-interesting entries (it monitors my entire site) and to black out the IP addresses of my visitors. Privacy is important.

It shows, however, a LOT of visitors that do not have a referer. That would mean they either got the link to my article over MSN, IRC, or a similar communication method, or that they simply typed the address entirely by hand (which is unlikely). I’ve collected 40 of those no-referer visitors over the day (the normal amount of blog visitors is maybe 3 or 4 a day) and I have no clue where they are coming from. The most notable thing, though, is that the first option (links over IM applications) is pretty much impossible, since the first visitor to my article doesn’t have a referer either. I know there is someone in that list with Twitter as referer, another very weird thing. I doubt I’m on their front page, so it should show at least some search page or profile page in the URL. Maybe they’re my followers on Twitter?

Very, very weird.