I am looking at buying a website with lots of traffic but the stats say nearly 50% from direct requests. I'm used to getting most of my traffic from search engines. Is a percentage of direct request as high as 50% quite common, or should I be thinking something sounds a little dodgy?
well depends if its a high popular site then yes, direct hits could be higher. What i mean is, if you use google, you don't google to find google, you just go there directly. Similarly with most of your daily used sites, you do not search for them. So it varies, if the site is regularly used by users then yes, but again, you have to look at broader stats. If the site you are buying has too little visitors like 100 uniques/ day then chances could be it is not true!!
If the search engine referrer stats show loads of people are searching for site.com and arriving at the site then you can be confident it has good branding and that a lot of people will come directly. If nobody is searching for site.com then its unlikely they are typing it in the address bar.