GA producing apparently impossible referral results

[roblucas]

Hi,

I'm using Google Analytics to track lots of individual sites- a main one and some affiliates. Recently, for no apparent reason, Google Analytics has started reporting a lot of referrals from a particular 3rd party site to one of these affiliate sites in particular. This is a 3rd party site that indeed does link to some of the affiliate sites, but the really strange thing is that the one affiliate site to which this 3rd party does not link at all is the one that has been showing
the referrals.

Does anyone have any idea what could be causing this? My best suggestion at the moment is that GA is getting confused on IP addresses, but then why this specific confusion on this specific site?

Does anyone have any detailed knowledge of how GA actually tracks different sites, how it resolves addresses, how it stays up-to-date on them etc?

Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks,

Rob Lucas.