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Referrers

The biggest source of traffic are search engines, directories and inbound-links. The percentages in which search engines appear on your traffic report should roughly correspond to their market share. If they don't it may be worth considering optimization strategies for the search engine. There are a number of surveys of search engine use. For the US around 40% of searches pass through Google, 30% with Yahoo, 15% with MSN Search and 5% for the rest. These surveys don't always make clear where they aggregate results, for example Google powers AOL search and Yahoo! owns AllTheWeb, AltVista and Overture. In Europe the figure for Google rises to over 70% followed by Yahoo! and MSN Search. You can find the latest information on the Search Engine Watch <http://www.searchenginewatch.com/>.

With the brouhaha surrounding anchor text and PageRank it is easy to forget that inbound-links do bring traffic. Your traffic analysis software will show the top referrers. These sites may be worth cultivating further. Similarly it may be worth investigating link partners that are not sending you much, or any traffic. Is your link hidden away somewhere or has it been dropped altogether. Referrer information will also show sites that are hotlinking, that is sites that are linking directly to your resources: images, videos etc. Some webmasters don't object to this but others see it as bandwidth theft. If your site is hosted on Apache or Microsoft IIS you can use rewrite rules to block hotlinks. In the following example the rules redirect hotlinks to a dummy image except where the referrer is mydomain.com.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?mydomain\.com/ [NC
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteRule \.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ images/dummy.jpg [L]

Referrers

See Also