Who doesn’t toss referrers?

At about 8 AM this morning, MobileTracker had a nice spike. This isn’t news… It gets spikes all the time. That’s just publishing. It’s actually kind of sad that I was watching the site at that time and am taking the time to write about it here. Alas.

Here’s where it gets weird: there were no big referrers. A few Google News searches here and there, but the vast majority of visitors looked like they just typed in the exact link to a permalinked story. Very unlikely.

It’s not even that great of a story… So what kind of link doesn’t produce referrers? My only thought is email, but it’s a hell of a lot of people for an email. And I figured I’d see a lot of “webmail referrers”.

Also, most large email lists have link tracking built in, so I should see a referrer. For example, a list might link to ‘http://www.theirsite.com/link/?id=12545’ and their scripts note that you clicked on that link. That way they know you are:

A) Actually reading and enjoying the content
B) They can jack up advertising rates
C) They know what their readers like best

Anyway, if you know what’s up… comment. I doubt that I’ll find out, but you never know. Another thought is that it could of just been a LOT of people checking their RSS readers. But I don’t think that’s the case cause the popular story was posted several days ago.

For your viewing pleasure (and due to the graph’s y axis being unlabled), the spike capped out at about 400 page views. The green is uniques, and it capped at about 150ish.