Sudden increase in visitors. Good / Spammed?

I have an article directory that has been growing steady for the past month or so. Roughly around 500 uniques per day and 2.04 page views per person. Avg time on the site was around 2 min.

62% of the traffic was comming from the Search Engines.

20 % was direct.

I just noticed a sudden spike in traffic and I'm not sure if that's a good thing or if I just got put on a spam list.

Stats from yesterday - 5/29/11

1224 uniques
3404 page views
2.78 time on site
17.96% bounce rate

This is great, but the one difference I noticed is that :

83.42% of the traffic is direct traffic and

13.24% is referred from the Search Engines.

Also, the top landing page is

http://www.article-smart.com/login.php - 936 entrances

This is a pretty big swing. Any ideas? I tried checking it out in analytics, webmaster tools, etc but it's direct ( meaning they type the site in the tool bar )

I also did notice on aweber that some of the links in the follow up emails are being clicked multiple times ( like 10 times )

This is what is making me think that I got added to an article directory software or something.

Also, if I did, I'm not really sure if that's a bad thing or good thing.

My aweber subscriptions jumped from 20 a day to over 100 yesterday. Wonder if they are garbage emails.

Thoughts?

PS. The only marketing I have recently done is started to optimize the site and submitted to 200 directories, 50 social bookmarking sites, and submitted the RSS Feed to 75 RSS feed websites.