Seems many clients are not setting referrer. In fact most are not setting referrer. Is this a known thing?

Mark Baker kindly linked to my On RSS/Atom replacing SOAP post. Interestingly, he did it by linking to the Webservices tag instead of directly to the article.

That particlar tag was getting practically no traffic before Mark linked to it. Since he linked to it it’s gotten 105 hits. However, I only have 29 referrers from Mark’s blog, and 5 more from his del.icio.us entry. This is all according to awstats.

So what’s going on? Where are the remaining 71 hits coming from? I’m pretty certain they’re from Mark’s blog, but the referrers are not set.

Is this because of the blog reader software people are using? Last I looked (which was quite a while back) referrer was set by the vast majority of the browsers. Looks like it’s not anymore. Are blog readers bad referrer citizens?