Also, a technical question

[flexagon]

Yesterday someone named Dawn wrote me seeing significant traffic coming from my domain to hers, and wondering if I had linked to her page (and if so, to what). She thanked me for the traffic. I couldn't remember doing so. Feeling mildly paranoid, I logged on to my hosting service to see if any files had been added without my knowledge, but I didn't see anything new. So I wrote back to Dawn proclaiming bafflement and asking if she could see the referring URL on my domain, but no, her hosting service stats only tell her the referring domain... so basically I'm clueless now. (I can't Google over my domain for her domain name to find the link, since Google doesn't find the stuff inside the "a href" tag as far as I can tell. I could do a text search over the files on my laptop at home, but I forgot to last night...) Very odd.

Does anyone know what else I could do to figure it out? I heard that AltaVista has a way to find links to one's page, but when I went there I couldn't find that feature.

Comments

Nope...

[bluechromis.livejournal.com]

I'm no help at all, but that is bizzare and I'm very curious to hear what the solution is. I'm actually wondering if it's something automated that's using your sites as jumping points to confuse an ip trail.

Re: Nope...

[flexagon]

*nods* I'm curious too... the good news is that Dawn says it's not a problem, per se, so it's not like she minds. Could be worse if it was so much traffic it was a bandwidth problem or something, but it's more like 12 hits per day. Only significant on "personal page" scales.

[webrat.livejournal.com]

Go to google's advanced search (http://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=en)... scroll down til you see "Find pages that link to the page" .. and see if anything of yours comes up?

Might want to try this? I just found it:
http://www.jdlasica.com/blog/archives/2003_02_10.html

Cool google trick, thanks

[flexagon]

I did that... my site doesn't come up though. I think blue is right and there's some technical trickery going on.

Then I did the same for my own main page, and found just one link (from further in on my own domain). I happen to know I'm linked at least from HLM's page as well, so it missed that, but dayamn! Don't I have any other friends left online? Hell, back in my college daze when I had a crappy site I think I'd've done better than that. Sniffle, sulk. :(

<mood: forlorn>

Re: Cool google trick, thanks

[webrat.livejournal.com]

Might be possible that your site is being framed or something.. not that I can see how any of this is possible, but I don't know. I can't think of any scenario that would make this technical trickey possible without hacking your domain to make it so.