[lug] Httpd log question

[Bill Thoen]

I'm running RH9 with apache and as I was looking through my 
/var/log/httpd/access_log file I noticed a lot of web "hits" aren't 
showing the referring URL. For example, I see things like this:

69.242.25.101 - - [28/Aug/2005:06:54:23 -0600] "GET /notebook/unusual.htm 
HTTP/1.1" 200 8497 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 
5.0)"

If the person was referred to the web page from a link or a search engine,
the "-" after the number 8497 above will contain the URL of the web page
they jumped in from. I figured out that one way that the referring URL
can show up as "-" is if the person manually types the URL into their
browser, but it seems that for this "unusual.htm" page I get quite a few
like this. My other pages don't seem to show this behavior as much.

Does anyone here know what other ways a web surfer can get to a page and
leave no trace as to where they came from? I'm sort of curious because 
it's my second-most popular page and I'd like to figure out what I'm doing 
right.

- Bill Thoen