Last week parents were horrified to learn about a recall on Maclaren umbrella strollers due to multiple cases of children’s fingers being amputated. The volume of traffic to the Maclaren website jumped 9x in volume on Monday, Nov. 9, 2009 as the recall hit the news and initially overloaded the website.

While the recall was only for products within the US, concerns also caused the volume of visits to surge 12x in the UK for the British stroller company.

Search was the top driver of traffic to the Maclaren website on Nov. 9th and referred 42% of the visits that day, 97% which were new visitors that had not been to the website in the past 30 days. The Maclaren website received the highest share of clicks from a portfolio of search terms related to the recall last week, which allowed the manufacturer to communicate directly with the owners of the strollers and help control the message. The top news websites to receive traffic from Maclaren recall searches were MSNBC and Google News.

Despite the bad situation, the upside for Maclaren is that only one law firm appeared in the downstream search results at #33 last week, but quick queries on the search engines show display more than one starting to pop up. Several law firms have started to buy the recall-related search terms, which may start to attract visitors looking to file a case.