Weird Russian sites linking to me? I smell a rat...?

I'm looking at Awstats for my site, and under the "Connect to site from" function, it gives me

• zen-cart.com/showthread... - 14

Fourteen people took their time to look at my site after I posted here on the forum. That's nice! But then come all these weird Russian sites, and some are totally bizarre and some are frankly pornographic and I don't like them. And I don't see anywhere on their page, where there is a link to my page. I smell a rat.

Names like "rosinvest" and "erotika-foto"... it just goes on and on, a lot of .ru sites and .de sites. Who are they and what are they trying to do? :ohmy:

Yours,

Culture Click the Toddler Zenner

What were the user agents? Probably just spiders.

Set up google webmaster tools and install analytics and you can then see inbound links and referrals to your site.

I just have to bring this up again. I'm seriously worried!

My hosting company has several statistics programs, and on Awstats, it gives this list:

Links from an external page (other web sites except search engines)

... sorry, can't publish them, right, and don't want to, but then follows a whole list of URL's, only a few of which refer to Facebook or Google, and the rest of which refer to a multitude of Russian language sites, all totally unrelated to anything I am selling, and most of them heinously pornographic. It's alarming!:yuck:

I can not find any link to my website on any of those pages either - I held my nose long enough to thoroughly search two of those URLs for any link that pointed to anything on my website, and I could find it. Those pages are gross, and the people running them might not be very nice, so this makes me even more suspicious... WHY are these people linking to my site and why are those links invisible, somehow?

Grossed out,

Culture Click the Toddler Zenner

CultureClick:

I just have to bring this up again. I'm seriously worried!

My hosting company has several statistics programs, and on Awstats, it gives this list:

Links from an external page (other web sites except search engines)

... sorry, can't publish them, right, and don't want to, but then follows a whole list of URL's, only a few of which refer to Facebook or Google, and the rest of which refer to a multitude of Russian language sites, all totally unrelated to anything I am selling, and most of them heinously pornographic. It's alarming!:yuck:

I can not find any link to my website on any of those pages either - I held my nose long enough to thoroughly search two of those URLs for any link that pointed to anything on my website, and I could find it. Those pages are gross, and the people running them might not be very nice, so this makes me even more suspicious... WHY are these people linking to my site and why are those links invisible, somehow?

Grossed out,

Culture Click the Toddler Zenner

Keep in mind that with AWStats the sites might not necesarily be linking to your page. Some of your customers/guests/robots who visit your page might be coming immediately from them. It might be they just directly typed your address in and came to your page or in the case of a bot, just went to your page next.

If it's really bugging you and you've got time on your hands - look in the log files to see exactly where they are going when they visit your site after surfing ########. Are they all headed for a specific file? Does that file match the original file that came with ZC? Do all the files in your store match the original files that came with the install or do you have any additional .php or other executable files that have been added into a folder somewhere?
It's not enough to just say they're coming from a certain site, it's what they do or try to do when they get to your store that you should be looking at.