No PPC or email, I have been pushing straight organic with a lot of 301 work.

Just real weird to see a jump like this in direct traffic that mimics the referral and organic trends.

Thanks again for the feedback.

Thanks for the reply.  I get what you are saying, but there is something that just isn't quite right about the answer in the article.  A 301 happens on the server side, so google wouldn't know about it.  Additionally, no page (let alone tracking code) exists for the old urls that now have redirects.  I would think that in order to qualify it as a referrer, google would have to know where the traffic was referred from ... no?  I think I would feel better if the article you referenced actually stated 301 instead of a redirect (possibly client-side) that COULD be tracked by google.

Here is something I found where there are conflicting answers to the same question I have here, maybe some others here on SEOMoz can weigh in on this as well.

Does anyone have any insight on exactly how on-site 301s are reported in Google Analytics?  My direct traffic seems to climb at the same rate as my organic with absolutely no off-line promotion.  I have a suspicion that the 301s that I have built to re-coupe traffic being sent to old pages are being reported as direct.  Any validity to this?