IndexTools and SiteMeter

Today, there was a big jump in traffic to the Former Naval Person blog (NSFW). The peak was several hours ago. IndexTools is now consistently showing higher traffic and page view counts than SiteMeter. SiteMeter is generally said to be the way that people judge website traffic, so there is an instant from incorrect performance, if that is what we are seeing. I have spent a small amount of time studying the visit details from SiteMeter and IndexTools, and I suspect that when a browser has Javascript disabled, and possibly cookies disabled, both SiteMeter and IndexTools are not able to tell how a visitor was referred. They both think that a visitor is from a direct link, even though it is a first time visitor. Invariably, at least Javascript is disabled for that visitor.