Large difference in visitor source counts

Large difference in visitor source counts in Google Analytics

[hexagone]

I'm trying to understand the reason behind the difference visitor
source counts.
Google Analytic gives me the following numbers for February

1.(direct) 202

2.google 28

3.yahoo 16

4.msn 3

My stats from AWstats
- Google 277
- Yahoo 27
- Unknown search engines 3
- MSN 2

As you can Yahoo and MSN are pretty close. What could cause the Google visitor to be marked as direct visitor? I have tested by doing a Google search for a specific keyword to get to my site and the visit is correctly counted, the goal is tracked but it gets listed as direct instead of Google. I don't Javascript is enable and I haven't blocked the referrer. It does this on at least two of my sites and I can't understand what could be wrong. I know there can be slight
variation between statistics programs be this seem to be pretty large.

Thank you for your help

[Receptional]

Isn't Astats a log based analyser? If so - you are not comparing like with like. Two threads that may help are:

[webmasterworld.com...] and
[webmasterworld.com...]

Best,

Dixon.

[hexagone]

Thanks Receptional I completly understand that there is a large difference between Javascript tracking and log file tracking but probably I didn't explain myself correctly.

What I am trying to find out is why a visit I made myself to my website isn't tracked correctly (I showed up a Direct visitor instead of Google referrer) even thought I accept cookies, have Javascript turned on and have no security software installed.

I suspect I am doing something wrong on my website since one one of my site it gets tracked correctly and on the other it isn't tracked correctly.

Thanks and sorry of there are a few mistake English isn't my first language.