Tuesday, 8 February 2011

Strange referring information from Yandex

I have a lot of strange visits to my blogs from yandex.ru - a big Russian search engine.

If you specify the search as the referring information says - you cannot even find my pages. If you specify the search within quotes " " you may have a chance - but this gives another name in the referring field,. Sometimes used keywords is a complete sentence showing one single hit at whole internet universe = my page. But that does not make sense! Who would make sucha a stupid search and happen to find my site :-/

Either Yandex have problems with sending referral information or someone is pulling my leg. Another theory is some surf utility with fake referring information.
It can also be referral spamming. But who gains anything on this?

Any one else? Just curious :)
 

10 comments:

Bettina B said...

I should never have written that. Lots of more strange visits from yandex. Every day. *giggling*. If this is referral spamming - give up. I will never visit your referral website.

vv said...

We encounter about the same issues at http://daihinia.com

As far as we were able to dig, this happens after the user installed Yandex Bar (a browser addon) and continues to happen even if the addon was uninstalled. When the visitor goes to our site from a blank page or from within our application, this Yandex Bar (or whatever remained after it was uninstalled) adds some weird information as referral.

In our experiments, the fake referral information was passed only to Google Analytics (via Javascript) and not to our web server too. It is probably a combination of bugs of Yandex Bar and IE8, as it does not happen with other browsers.

vv said...

most likely, the fake referral information is the victim's last query on yandex.

vv said...

so, the user searches for something on yandex, then time passes, and he/she follows a link to our sites from email or IM or whatever (something external to the web), and we see the user's yandex query as referral in our GA statistics.

and that referral isn't cleared even if user has restarted the browser or even the entire computer!

Bettina B said...

Thanks for your comment. I am not sure this is the same problem since it very often was complete paragraphs in referral info. Noone search for such long queries. But it might be a bug.

My 'problem' has declined. Now I only get weekly visits with blogname in referral info. But that is another thing - ppl mix up input box for searches and inputbox for http address.

Thanks anyhow! I am really happy to see someone sharing this info.

vv said...

yandex bar has a translation feature and people may feed complete paragraphs into it.

i suspect that this bug just takes the latest yandex link from the browser history, no matter whether is just search or a translation request too.

vv said...

i think we now know who is guilty, problem remains with what to do. :)

Bettina B said...

Yes that makes sense - translation. Thanks :)

vv said...

a-aha!

in the virtual machine where i experimented with yandex bar, i cleared IE's history. and no more yandex referrals are generated from it!

Bettina B said...

Laterly I get a lot of visitors to this blogpost having the same problem - strange referring information to their sites via Yandex

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