CNN - what the hell?
 

I was just looking through the server stats for my domain "hardcoreteensexvideos.com" and I found a bunch of hits from "cnn.com". I searched the CNN site but didn't find anything. I can't imagine why anyone would spoof that referer, but I also can't imagine why I would get hits from CNN. Has anyone else seen CNN popping up in their stats? The domain gets almost 0 traffic, most of it is a few hits from Google and Yahoo. It hasn't been involved in anything (as far as I know) that would draw attention from the media. Very weird.

SpaceAce

Maybe someone was at work or home and hitting the back button between the two sites so they would not get busted looking at your porn site..

Would a browser really report that as a referer though? I think most browsers only report a referer from a page you clicked a link on. For example, if you send your surfers through a forwarding script that records your clicks, the referer should still be the page they clicked the link on, not the script.

SpaceAce

I had the same thing in my referrers but never found anything on the site...Weird.

My neighbor has the exact same thing on his referring list. Something like 20,000 hits last month.

Funny as hell.

Maybe they're doing a story on you.. I'm thinking an internal list of porn sites there at CNN that the reporter(s) are clicking thru to gather information on.. I dunno -- just a theory..

Do the logs keep the referring URL?

-k

maybe somoene at cnn runs their own adult links list on the server

The exact URL is "http://cnn.com" like the front page. At least, that's the only CNN URL I found in the stats. I guess there could be "deep" pages on the CNN site that fall under the "xxx number of sites not listed" at the bottom of my referer stats.

Speaking of stats, please check out http://www.gofuckyourself.com/showth...threadid=98204

Maybe if I get better stats I can solve the mystery :thumbsup

SpaceAce

hm I've seen cnn.com in my logs also...

My guess is it's a proxy browser that changes the referrer so it always shows up as http://cnn.com

yep

Referer lines are not always accurate. From memory MSIE has (had?) a bug where it would occasionally send the URL of a page that the surfer has open when they type in your address. It shows up as a referer, but it doesn't actually link to you. My referer logs are filled with this random junk near the bottom (usually a single access 'from' that URL)

If it's consistently http://cnn.com then I'd say it's a spoofed referer, maybe a firewall. :)

.... your domain is pretty close to a site of ours.. and i've noticed the CNN also

What he said

I get other peoples sites/gallery pages that I'm not listed on as referers all the time in my logs.

I know that referers aren't 100% accurate, but this is no mistake. I am talking about several "cnn" referers per day. About 6/day this month. Adds up to a couple hundred per month.

That's interesting. I take it you mean your domain contains some of the same keywords.

SpaceAce