Tech note FS1436
Description
Why does the Top Referrers report only show referrers from my own web site?
What does the Top Referrers report mean?
Answer
When a web surfers clicks on a link to go to a new page, the page that they were on (ie, which contained the link they clicked on) is called the referrer page. This is true regardless of whether the referrer page is on your own web site or on an external web site. (Note that in the case of when a web surfers types the URL directly into their browser, rather than clicking on a link, there's no referrer.)
For example, let's assume that your web site is http://www.domain.com. A web surfer is sitting on your home page, http://www.domain.com/index.htm. They click on a link to go to page2, http://www.domain.com/page.htm. In this example, the requested page is page2.htm and the referrer page is index.htm.
However, if the user had typed the full URL http://www.domain.com/page2.htm into their browser (rather than clicking on the link on your home page), then the requested page would be page2.htm and there would be no referrer.
Once a user is at your site and clicks links within your site, the referrer will almost always be one of your own web pages (because they're always coming from one of your web pages). But in getting to your site in the first place the referrer is often a link on another page on an external web site. For example, Yahoo may have a link to your web site's home page.
The Top Referrers To Your Site report shows you the most common referrer pages for all requests made to your web site. This can be very useful to find out who is linking to your web site.
As mentioned above, this usually will contain mostly referrers from your own site. This information isn't very useful to many webmasters, so FlashStats provides an easy way to filter out referrers from your own site. To do this, simply enter into the Filter out requests from specific users textbox a piece of text that would likely be found in every referrer within your own site, and also make sure that the Filter referrers from specific users checkbox is checked.
For example, you might enter the text domain.com. Any referrer containing that piece of text will be omitted from the Top Referrers To Your Site report. This would match referrers starting with http://www.domain.com, or http://domain.com, or any other text containing domain.com. However, it would not match any referrer using your web site's IP address rather than the normal name. In order to specify multiple strings to match, just list them all in the Filter out requests from specific users textbox separated by commas (but no extra spaces around the commas). For example: domain.com,200.100.50,otherdomain.com
Finally, you should understand the relationship between the Filter out requests from specific users textbox and the Filter referrers from specific users checkbox. See Tech Note FS1437 for full details.
