I was monitoring link clicks on my url-shortner and I saw weird user-agents when the 'referer' was a particular website. My users might be using that website to post the links shortened by my url shortening service. But, is it possible for that website to change the user-agent strings of those users? Or, I should consider them as bot clicks?
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It depends on whether the shortener is simply redirecting to the long URL (in which case you get a Referer header, but the User-agent will be sent by the user's browser) or it's acting as a proxy where the shortener server itself makes the request to your app and passes the content back to the user. – Wooble Feb 17 '14 at 14:54
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It is just redirecting. So is there any possibility that the website on which the user clicked the link may change the user agent? – tunetopj Feb 17 '14 at 15:08
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No. The browser should be sending the same User-agent header regardless of how it got to the page. – Wooble Feb 17 '14 at 15:26