How do domain statistics work?
 

I'm looking through my statistics, and I see I've got over thirty visitors from the page http://x-entertainment.com/articles/0822/ . I've opened the source on that page and searched for anything that could resemle a link to wy own site, but there's nothing. This happens all the time. I get loads of hits from TheOneRing.net, Something Awful, FARK and all kinds of other sites, but there are no links. I guess there could be a mix-up now and then where people would leave XE or whatever to check for updates at my site in the same browser window and then that would count as a referral, but when I get over thirty hits from one page, it looks really suspicious.

Anyone know what's going on?

It could be that there *was* a link to your site on that page, but it has since been removed.

However, some browsers will treat the previous page that it was looking at as the HTTP_REFERRER, even though that page has absolutely nothing to do with yours. For example, on a browser that does that, you could be looking at I-Mockery, and then go to any site that was in your bookmarks list and that new site would count I-Mockery as a referrer.

Stuff like this can also happen on sites that open external links in a new, specifically named (rather than _blank) browser window, and people just don't bother to close that window as they click on each link (kinda like Fark).

They also can be loading images off your server. That happens to me all the time... sometimes I'll have to hunt down people on message boards and tell them to host their own avatars instead o' leaching my bandwidth.

That one sounds logical.

Yeah, I get that a lot. Damn thieving bastards.