So Direct visitors in GA are really Google

[denisl]

Have been having some issues with one site in Google serps recently which has resulted in a big trop in G traffic. Was interested to see that Direct visitors dropped also.

So I guess these the Direct visitors are really from Google but with a missing referer.

[Marketing Guy]

It's probably mobile traffic coming via Android or iOS - it's being returned as Direct / (not set). You'll notice the point it started happening was around Sept 2012.

It's not all organic traffic though - it could be instances of the website being opened in-app (FB, twitter, Linkedin, etc), combined with mobile searches.

[monitorscout]

Since when you are facing this issue. Because due to the recent penguin update many sites has been affected and pushed back to deep pages in serp. That might be causing the sudden drop in search traffic.

[denisl]

The drop in google traffic wasn't the point of my post, but it enabled me me to see that most of the supposed direct traffic was infact from google but not identified by "Referer"