A small percentage of search engine users may view a web site using a search engine’s saved copy of site pages, their cached version. The cached copy the search engine serves to the user usually contains links to embedded objects present in the original site: images, CSS stylesheets, javascript, etc. Organizations focusing on web marketing activities, such as search engine optimization, will want to track all search engine activity, including cached page views.
Referrers from the search engine’s cached copy will show up in the site’s web server log files, including the keywords and keyword phrases used to find the cached copy. In some cases, the user will click through to the original website, viewing a real page with cache referring information in the web server log file.
