One of our public sector recruitment sites has had a sudden, huge jump in direct referrals according to Google Analytics. That's normally a really, really good sign of some cracking offline marketing and brand awareness. Though my client is excellent at what they do, that spike in traffic has nothing to do with marketing..

It's all been a little mysterious - we've had some really unusual traffic on the site lately. It started about a month ago, where direct referrals skyrocketed intermittently, our bounce rate went through the roof to 95.88% (triple the rate!), and site conversions went down hugely.

We suddenly got about 9,000 direct referals in less than a week. That never happens on this site!

I got our webserver team to look at the logs to find out what was going on. This issue was instantly explained by the large number of requests coming from this UA:

HTTP/1.0 Mozilla/5.0+(X11;+U;+Linux+i686+(x86_64);+en-US;+rv:1.8.1.11)+Gecko/20080109+(Charlotte/0.9t;+http://www.searchme.com/support/)

Hum. It turns out the user agent: Charlotte (?!) belongs to a company called searchme - they're the guys behind the Wikiseek engine.

What's a "search engine designed to improve Wikipedia search" doing crawling all over my website?! (By the way, Danny Sullivan didn't like their search results). I could think of two reasons:

1) Searchme are crawling the rest of the world wide web with the intention of including non-Wikipedia search results into their index

2) Charlotte, their robot, got bored crawling Wikipedia and has gone out partying on the internet past her bedtime. When her mum and dad find out, she'll be grounded for sure.

Richard Baxter is Founder and Director of SEOgadget.co.uk, a UK SEO Consulting firm. Follow him on Twitter and Google Buzz...