Newbie confused over "guests" in stats

[gnarpen]

Never heard of lunka.com or domina.co.il but when I look at the stats at my host I can see their url in front of a couple of my galleries, like this:

http://www.lunka.com/v/?http://www.m...com/blabla/bla
http://www.domina.co.il/frame.aspx?u...com/blabla/bla

and when I click the url I find my gallery at their site

Why? How? Who?

[cd34]

Appears to act as a 'bookmark' tool that allows a user to have a frame at the top showing them URLs of interest. Based on some quick testing, it doesn't appear that they are modifying the content, just placing it in a frame.

They link to your site, put their ads up top, possibly grab a little of the traffic off the top since the top banner spots usually have the highest CTR and you still have your advertising showing.

You could block it, but, since you are still getting credit for the banners if they click your part of the frame, I would probably just be thankful for the traffic (if there is much).

Another reason you'll see foreign urls in your stats that have no real relation to your content is sometimes Hosting Companies like to leave stats visible at predictable urls like /stats/ or /cgi-bin/awstats.pl, etc. If they can send enough fake referral traffic to your site, since your stats are readable by google, and usually urls are linked in the stats report, google sees that as a linkback from your site to their site.

However, in the case above, it looks like they are just framing your content and putting their banners up top.

[gnarpen]

Originally Posted by cd34

You could block it, but, since you are still getting credit for the banners if they click your part of the frame, I would probably just be thankful for the traffic (if there is much).

Yes, I looked again and the recip.links and my ref.codes are untouched, they just put a bunch of hieroglyphic text at the top, so I would probably (as you say) just be thankful for the traffic (they are among the top 50 referring URLs)

Thank you for the education

Peter