Question about webalizer stats

[lfgoal]

I'm looking at webalizer stats for a particular site, a small one, and the top 3 referrers are as as follows:

1 406461 22.61% - (Direct Request)
2 260438 13.88% http://www.example.com/
3 96003 5.20% [google.com...]

Does direct referrer mean that the user typed in the url directly, that they didn't follow a link from another site or from a search engine?

Also, my perception had been that the site has been heavily dependent on google, but these numbers seem to suggest that the site actually has some name recognition and is not as dependent on google as I thought.

Am I reading this right?

[edited by: engine at 5:35 pm (utc) on July 30, 2009]

[cgrantski]

No, not really. Please do a search on "direct traffic" or "no referrer" to find one of the many explanations for all the reasons that a visit can have no referrer. There are quite a few such reasons.

[tim222]

Direct Traffic: How do the people who clicked a bookmark to come to your site or typed your site URL into their browser compare to the "average" visitor to your site? Direct traffic can include visitors recruited via offline (i.e. print, television) campaigns.

[google.com...]

So it appears there are two sources of this sort of traffic:
1) Directly typing the name into the browser - either as a result of seeing it in a print ad, or just from memory.
2) Bookmarks in the visitor's browser.

Either way it would seem to be a high-quality source of traffic. Someone either bookmarked the site or took the trouble to remember the name.