One thought I have is that the traffic may be from StumbleUpon?
StumbleUpon is a site that allows people to give a thumbs up to pages that they like, and categorise them. These pages are then displayed to other StumbleUpon users that said they were interested in these categories.
I “think” it might be because :
1) StumbleUpon jumps to the pages using a “toolbar” that people click on – so I do not beleive that this will pick up any referrer page – and software often assumes that must mean a direct referrer.
2) StumbleUpon traffic is rubbish. Click, click, click. It’s a bit like changing channels on a TV people with very quickly jump away from a page to the next page in the category if nothing attracts them in 2 seconds.
Both points would seem to describe your traffic.
:hattip:
BTW : 12 months ago I was a happy StumbleUpon user – and the concept of a human moderated database of interesting sites was working well. I great way to kill an hour or two and find intersting sites that were not well search engine optimised.
Now – after StumbleUpon got popular – affiliates, marketters, and summy scammers have bloated the database into an unwieldly spamfest – and I never use the toolbar now. It’s basically been killed as a useful idea.
Shame …
:Cry: