Can someone explain what is going on here?
Looking at the website log for site A
There is an entry like this
"GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 6129 "site B specific page" (followed by user agent string)
The user then proceeds to navigate on site A
Why is there an entry for a specific page on site B?
There is no direct link from site A to that specific page on site B
Nor is there any direct link from that page on site B back to site A
Is it possible to determine what did the user site did?
Its possible to log the site that links TO the site you have.
And other things that direct links can cause the linakge - javascripts etc.
It's possible that Site A has been framed. What happens is that Site B creates a page, probably with lots of advertising around it, within which is a frame showing the contents of one or more other sites. IANAL, but I understand that this is a breach of copyright, because it is creating a work derivative of, here, Site A, without Site A owner's permission.
If that's what is really happening, then the cure for Site A is a standard very simple get-out-of-jail piece of JavaScript:
As long as Site B isn't vetting or just preventing JavaScript being run on Site A, this works every time, but also bounces pages out of, say, translation and image search engines, which work by the same method. Therefore in priniciple it would be desirable to do something more sophisticated that searches top.location for strings like 'google' and 'babelfish', but unfortunately, for very good security reasons, this is not possible from within the page, only from Site A's server.
Therefore, before go> Can someone explain what is going on here?
Might just be referrer link spam. A bot loads one of your pages with a referrer of the page they want you to visit.
GET / means it has defaulted to the home page on site A
"site B specific page" is the referrer, ie the page with a link to site A
Its the referrer, where your user came FROM
May have been at the time the page was accessed, etc.
Maybe, maybe not, need to know at lot more about site A and site B *at the time the event happened*
Probably the user was browsing site B, then clicked a bookmark saved on his PC to take him to (your) site A, or simply typed your URL into his browser while he still had the previous site open. The description "referring site" is *sometimes* a misnomer; it's sometimes more accurate to call it
*previous* site, it doesn't always follow that the "referring" site actually referred the user to your site via a link.An example is if you're searching for something on Google then open your bookmarks and click one to look at the BBC, the BBC logs will show that the last site you looked at before theirs, was Google. Most of the time it does indeed show you which sites are linking to yours (and search terms in Google that give your site as a search result) but other times it can be completely random. You'll find that sites that link to yours (and Google) will show up in your logs with plenty of referrals but the "odd" sites that have no connection to yours, will only show up with one or two at the most.
Unlikely; any properly-behaving browser would submit a blank HTTP referer [= sic] field in such cases.
In the OP's case it could well be a case of 'referer spam' whereby a spamme= r submits their URL in the referer field of a page request. This is not don= e to make you visit their site (although that'd be a not unwelcome side eff= ect) but instead is banking on the chance that you publish your web access = logs. Such logs will include referer URLs, usually as valid links, and this= can lead to the spammer's site fairing better on search engine results whe= re 'popularity' (in terms of numbers of links to) forums part of the rankin= g criteria.
Mathew
Thanks for the replies, I've concluded it's maybe a false alarm. Looking back at Site B on archive.org at some time in the distant past it did have a link to site A. Site B appears to recently redone their website and they have simply cut and pasted text content from their old website into their current website hence the absence of any direct links.
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