[thelist] referer field

[John Richard Stevens]

Joshua,
Here's what I get when I have a gif on the page:

Host: 66.205.128.168 Url: /images/imhosted_button1.gif Http Code : 200 
Date: Feb 15 01:40:52 Http Version: HTTP/1.1" Size in Bytes: 1761 
Referer: http://www.englishdiscourse.org/edr.1.4smutny.html Agent: Mozilla/4.0 
(compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; Q312461) 

And when I remove the gif, I get a report with the search string info:

Host: 24.200.95.69 Url: /edr.1.4smutny.html Http Code : 200 
Date: Feb 15 12:12:41 Http Version: HTTP/1.1" Size in Bytes: 21351 
Referer: http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-
8&q=daniel+callahan+self-determination&meta= Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; 
MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1) 

Essentially, in the first example, the last image called becomes the url and 
the page being accessed becomes the referer. I lose all the google info.
thanks. john


Quoting Joshua Olson <joshua at waetech.com>:

> > -----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
> 
> 
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