The Referrer field of a log file stores the location from which a visitor came. In other words, it stores the previously requested URL that linked to your site. From this information, you can see what links led visitors to your site - and you can pull out the keyword (if present) that was used in a search engine query which resulted in a click-through.

But, what is happening when you analyze your Web site and you see the phrase 'No Referrer'? Is it really possible for some visitors to come from nowhere? (Insert Twilight Zone theme music here...)

There is an explanation for this. Here are some of the reasons and conditions under which this phenomenon, called 'No Referrer,' can occur.

1) Manual type-in: Often when people visit a particular site, they don't search for it, or rely on a link from an affiliate. Instead, they type the domain name of the site directly into the address bar of the browser. Such visitors know what site they want to visit and simply go there directly. In this case, no web page referred them to the site—they went there on their own. So, who gets the credit of being the referrer? No one. Your web server will log the referrer in this case as "-," and your web analytics tool may report 'No Referrer.'

2) Bookmarks: Another common way users visit their favorite sites is to bookmark them. A user may have spent a lot of time finding a site that provides the exact information he or she is looking for, and does not want to search for it again—like when you finally find the site that has instructions for programming your universal remote control!

The next time they want return to the site, they use the bookmark. The users were not referred by any other site; they went to the site directly, so the referrer in this case is 'No Referrer' as well.

3) Spiders/Robots: Search Engine spiders and robots constantly crawl the Internet in search of new content to be indexed and made available via their search engines. Typically a spider won't have a referrer, though it's not impossible for a robot/spider to have a referrer, though it may or may not represent an actual web page.

4) E-mail campaigns: If you send an e-mail campaign that contains links to your web site, a visitor clicking on one of those embedded links won't have a referrer. This is kind of the exception to the rule, as there really is something there that referred the visitor to the site—but e-mail clients don't have URLs associated with them, so they don't pass a referrer to the log files. In this case, you can modify the URL: you can use a single URL parameter/value pair to either identify the campaign as a whole, or a parameter with unique values to identify individual users or groups.

5) Browser's Homepage: If a visitor has their browser's default page set to your business' homepage, this means that every time they launch their browser, your homepage is requested. If this is case, there is no referring page that sent the visitor to your homepage, so again, there is no referrer.

The next time you're browsing through your list of referring sites in your Web analytics tool, and you see 'No Referrer', one of the reasons listed above will probably explain why this is occurring. In most cases, 'No Referrer' can actually be seen as a good thing. If someone likes your site enough to have the URL memorized, have it saved as a bookmark or even have it set as their browser's homepage, you're definitely doing something right!

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