So many "others" in referring keywords, 65% "

[Socks Manly]

Hi, I run a website using Redhat and Urchin to view the weblogs. We log most everything as far as I know.

When I look at this month's search terms, I get this.

1. (other) 83,847 65.60%

We have over 7,000 other unique terms listed, so it's picking up a good deal of them, but this is a huge number of "other" results, no?

[incrediblehelp]

Could these be non-referers like when people type the domain into the address bar?

[crashingflwrgrl]

A 65% "no referrals" rate is still pretty high. I use Urchin myself and my "no referrals" rate has been as high as 80%! I would love to think that all these people are typing my url directly into their address bar but it seems very unlikely.

Which begs the question...just how acurate are the Urchin stats?

[mushroom]

Originally Posted by crashingflwrgrl

A 65% "no referrals" rate is still pretty high. I use Urchin myself and my "no referrals" rate has been as high as 80%! I would love to think that all these people are typing my url directly into their address bar but it seems very unlikely.

Which begs the question...just how acurate are the Urchin stats?

Could they be return visitors using bookmarks ?

[Socks Manly]

I guess it *could* be, but I highly doubt this as well. I suppose we could have a big number of bookmarkers, but I'd never think to that extent.

[crashingflwrgrl]

Could they be return visitors using bookmarks?

A percentage of them are. The rest are typed-ins, caching, no caching, reloads, drop down history from address bar etc.

[crashingflwrgrl]

Quote:
Could they be return visitors using bookmarks?

A percentage of them are. The rest are typed-ins, caching, no caching, reloads, drop down history from address bar etc.

[incrediblehelp]

To check to see how many people bookmarked your website, check for the favicon.ico in your referral log.

[Martin Smith]

Originally Posted by incrediblehelp

To check to see how many people bookmarked your website, check for the favicon.ico in your referral log.

This will give misleading results, some browsers (eg Mozilla) access this file (or at least attempt to) every time the page is viewed.

[incrediblehelp]

I agree, it was just a suggestion for a point of reference for bookmarking totals.

[jawn_tech]

I think it has to be a problem with Urchin. Those stats and percentages look way too shaky. A suggested solution is to compare results with a free invisible stats counter. Put one on your pages and compare the stats for a month or two. There are some nice ones out there that only draw revenue from ads to users and paid upgrades, but even the free services have some really nice comprehensive stats that are actually comparable to what many hosting companies provide webmasters.