A Puzzling Link

[EssEEmily]

I'm stumped and I'm hoping some mozzers will be able to help.

I run our company blog (http://scottymacblog.com/). The last couple of days I have noticed that the blog is receiving some traffic from cnn.com. I looked, but cannot find any mention of the blog on cnn. Adding to my frustration is that the content on cnn is constantly changing. Our blog doesn't do any sort of advertising and no one affiliated with the blog posts on cnn. As great as it is to be getting traffic from such a valued source, I have no idea why.

Has something like this happened to (for?) anyone else?  Any ideas on how I can research the source of the link?

Thanks in advance!

[EssEEmily]

Thanks for everyone's responses! I believe I have solved the mystery.

I went into my analytics and found that traffic had been sent from cnn.com, edition.cnn.com and weather.cnn.com. EGOL had mentioned the widgets that news sites will often use to link to relevant stories. Turns out I found a widget on the weather page that is administered by outside.in - a service that localizes content. I added our blog's feed to outside.in months ago and completely forgot about it. So, I'm assuming, someone who was searching weather or news in the Portland area perhaps would see our most recent post on Portland food carts.

I'm assuming these widgets don't pass any link juice, but I'm so glad to have the traffic and exposure. I suggest anyone who ever writes localized content should sign up for outside.in - your post might just show up on cnn.com.  

[MarieHaynes]

Are you running any Adwords ads?  Sometimes when someone clicks on an Ad on another website, in some analytics programs it will look like you are getting visits from that website.  So, perhaps one of your Adwords ads is appearing within CNN's Adsense?

[Bevelwise]

The other thing I find useful when there is puzzling links to our clients websites is scanning through Google Webmaster Tools.  Go into the links section and it will find show you the exact url the link is located on.  This does though assume that the link on cnn.com is crawlable, indexable and has been displayed.  If the scenario is happening that EGOL mentioned then this recommendation will not help.

[EGOL]

Sometimes CNN and other news sites have widgets that link out to relevant sites or sites that have linked to one of their stories.  Often the text within these widgets is not crawled by search engines - making it very hard to locate.

Also, you might have been mentioned with a link in the comments under a story.

You know that cnn.com is the domain sending the traffic... does your analytics have a way to detect the full URL?  If you have daily log files you could run one through a log analysis program such as WebLogExpert looking for all cnn.com referral pages.