Crazy Increase in Direct Traffic?

[KevinMcC]

So far today I have had 41 visitors (97% unique) come to one of my poker sites 'direct' or typing in my URL.

This is a crazy huuuuge increase of any other day where the I usually see like 3 or 4.

What could cause this? Any ideas at all?

[Sebastian]

If you are using Google Analytics, this would likely be caused by people clicking on bookmarks that are nofollow. I read somewhere that there is no distinction from google analytics. I know direct traffic should be be people actually typing in the words, but Analytics sucks and that would be my explanation,

[Bryan]

Could be "referrer bots". Bots that hammer a site, acting as if the visits were referred by a site. The idea being, a webmaster that's keeping a close eye on his visits will be intrigued that ogm-buy-viagra-for-longhard-shaft.com is sending 17 referrals, and in return, visit their site.

I used to manually log all page views to a database for one of our sites, and then I could run queries to show page views, unique visitors, referring sites, etc. Due to these types of bots though, I had to stop using that because they pretty much made the stats unusable.

Google Analytics generally does a pretty good job of detecting these, and discarding them from the stats reported.

[Marcelo]

Maybe word of mouth? Something like an e-mail: check out this great site ?

[pipeline]

If you submitted a press release or something like that the urls usually don't transfer over if a website uses it so instead of clicks you get direct referrals....Could be something like that or someone mentioned your site in a forum or article without hyperlinking it.