Referral Testing Page


This is an example page to help you understand how referrals work. You can see how the referral changes for this page by reloading the page, linking to this page from your own pages or by following the links on this page.


Clicking on "Self" will cause the referral for this page to be itself.

If your page has a lot of graphics on it, the user may get impatient waiting for your page to load. If the page has a link to itself (like a home page that has a HOME link on it) they may click on it before the Site Meter counter has loaded. In that case, the referral will be the same page as the visit entry page in your reports. The visit will also (at that point) show one page view because the user interrupted the first page view before the counter loaded.

Clicking on "the other page" will show this page as the other page's referral.

Some of the other things you can try are:
  1. Open another browser window and drag this page from this window and drop it on the other. You can do that by dragging the little page icon that is at the beginning of the address line in the browser.

  2. Put a link to this page in an email and mail it to your self. Try mailing it to both a web based email address (like hotmail.com) and a regular account. When the email comes in, click on the link in the email. The web based ones will have a referral but if you aren't logged into your email account, you shouldn't be able to use the referral address to get back to the original email message. The referral for a link from a regular email program (like Outlook Express) should be 'unknown' or 'EMPTY'.

  3. You can also drag any link on a web page onto another browser window. Click on a link and and while holding the mouse button down, drag-and-drop it onto another open browser window. Some browsers won't record the referral if you do that. It is a handy way to stop a referral from being recorded if you don't want it to showup in the site's referral report.