Awstats showing strange 404 referrers

Question

When I look at Awstats 404 errors I see sometimes strange referrers. For example on www.mydomain.com I might see a 404 error reported in Awstats that says:

URL (not found)        Referrers
some-file.jpg          http://www.mydomain.com/some-page.html

some-file.jpg is a file that does not exist, so it's not strange that if someone tried to reach it got back a 404 from server.

The strange part is that the referring page DOES NOT EXIST TOO, I mean http://www.domain.com/some-page.html DOES NOT EXIST, so how could it be the referrer?

Is it some client cheating the referrer?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Referrer Spam is where a spammer sends fake Referrer data to see if it ends up in the referrers section of your public web-pages showing your standard web-log analyses (e.g "Top Referrers"). If the fake referrer does become visible, the spammer know they can use this technique to place spam links into your web-site causing visitors to your site to see links to their spam sites.