I have received a couple of emails recently from site owners saying that they are finding referrer links in their stats with their URL path but my domain. So if a website has a page www.theirsite.com/blog/article1, they would find a referrer www.mysite.com/blog/article1. So far I've always thought that this is spam, a way for me to look at their website. Anyone else experienced anything like this?
Note, I am running Wordpress.
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Matthew Xerri
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This sounds very suspect. Some malware will only try and attack a client or display an advertizement if the referer comes from Google. Modify the referer on one of these pagers and see waht you get. (Also its referer, not referrer, the RFC was misspelled and the HTTP header you are referring to is spelled referer with only one r.) – rook Nov 11 '13 at 17:33
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hehe thanks for the correct spelling. The funny thing is that the referer on `theirsite.com` is showing to be pages that do not even exists on our site so your idea of changing our referer to see what happens cannot be tested. Contacted the site that is seeing referers from our site and they say that this is only being seen in Jetpack (a Wordpress plugin). Nothing suspicious is being seen on Google Analytics. – Matthew Xerri Nov 11 '13 at 19:28
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this is very easy to test by creating an arbitrary HTTP request. Google analytics can be disabled by malware. – rook Nov 11 '13 at 20:51