question about referrers

[missdomestic]

This will probably be a stupid question, but I'm confused about my referrer list in the Cpanel.

Most of the referring links track back to pages that I'm aware of (bloggers with my site on their blogroll, links to me in the text, etc.) but today I found a slew of refferers that were new to me. I checked them out (they were almost entirely personal blog sites), and couldn't find anything linking to me anywhere. No blogrolls, no hyperlinks, no nothing. A few of them were Blogspot things that had no hyperlinks at all save comment and archive links. How can a site be listed as referring me when I scour the page and can't find a trace of my site anywhere?

Confused,
Miss Domestic

[jason]

Are they linking to images from your site, perhaps? This is a very common occurance that can eat away at your bandwidth allotment if you aren't careful. A lot of people here use mod_rewrite settings to prevent this from happening. Search for "hotlink protection" on this board and you'll find several threads dealing with it.

Referers are send with all HTTP requests that originate from within a page. The most common reason for them being sent is when a user clicks a link to your site from a page, but they are also sent if an image, scrip, stylesheet, or any other kind of media is linked from within that page, including someone stealing your images, which is probably the most common occurance after clicking links.

--Jason