A computer, computer program product, and method prioritize a web crawler target link queue using referrer context information associated with a remote object link. An access statistics collection module detects links to remote objects and retrieves referrer context information for the links. An access statistics back end module receives and stores the referrer context information from the access statistics collection module. The referrer context information is analyzed by a target list prioritization module that uses the results of the analysis to prioritize a target queue of a web crawler. The referrer context information is an important resource in identifying information about how a link spreads, e.g., for threat detection or identification of popular links for indexing to produce more relevant search results.