[thelist] referer field

Joshua Olson joshua at waetech.com
Sun Feb 15 12:36:04 CST 2004


> -----Original Message-----
> From: John Richard Stevens
> Sent: Sunday, February 15, 2004 1:30 PM
>
> I’m having a problem with the way my web access logs report “referer”
> and “url.” Example: I have a page with no gifs or jpg’s, and the referrer
> notes the Google, MSN, or whatever search—valuable info. As soon
> as I add a
> gif or jpg to the page, my reports show the image as the url and
> the referrer
> is now the file at mysite.com. Is there any way to put a gif or
> jpg on ones
> page and not lose the search engine info in the referer field?

John,

This behavior seems a bit odd for any platform of client.  I believe that
there may be a good chance that you, or your reporting software, is
misinterpreting the log files.  Could you perhaps post a _few_ lines of the
log file that demonstrate this product or give us a link to the full log
file so that we can take a look.

Example:  The referrer for the page should be the page at which the link was
followed to get to the page and the referrer on the images should be the
page on which the images appear.

One thing that I do is to disable logging on the images, css, and JS include
folders altogether.  While this solution may not necessarily be the right
one if you are concerned about 404's and discovering abusive hot-linking to
your files, it's often times a simple fix to bloated log files where the
images, style sheets, and js includes create a lot of phantom hits.

<><><><><><><><><><>
Joshua Olson
Web Application Engineer
WAE Tech Inc.
http://www.waetech.com/service_areas/
706.210.0168




More information about the thelist mailing list