I left a comment agreeing with you on this post. - Robert Scoble
Linking may be less important but as I've said elsewhere the alternatives do not always provide quality traffic to go with the quantity. - Colin Walker via fftogo
'Like' * 3!!! You said what we've all wanted to say, Louis - thanks for this great post. - Jesse Stay via twhirl
Interesting... and I wonder what this is going to do to Google's rankjuice flow model... if linking to others as part of a mutual info/attention ecomony starts to decline in importance and value. - Tom Beardshaw
@tombeardshaw, you can see how old-school google is .. - gregory lent
There's now a pretty good dialog in the Disqus comments on Louis' blog as well. Good reading - Charlie Anzman
@louisgray this is totally wrong. Linking is one of the most powerful signals you can send to Google about your importance and authority in your topical area. I will leave a bigger comment on your post but basically just read @DannySullivan comment carefully because he said it well. And he should know. Especially brand new bloggers NEED high quality links to even be found in Google. What % of your traffic is through Google? 60%? 75%? Enuf said. - Elliott Ng
@gregorylent maybe... searching people and what they've found here vs searching pages and their content on google? I find FF more useful for finding the latest content. Google still rules as an archive though. - Tom Beardshaw
@Elliott - I think the point of the post was that Louis is getting traffic from FF, google etc rather than from blogs linking to his posts. - John
I guess this could be seen as a Tipping Point for your blog, Louis. When you started out you relied on other people linking to you but now you generated enough content, authority and page rank that the referral traffic from blogs is minimal compared to what you get from Google searches. - John
John, that could be one way of looking at it. Also, year over year, a link from Scoble is about the same. I didn't get linked to from the big guys, aside from him, in 2007. I would get about 200 visits from his stories last year, and the FriendFeed one drove about 350 this year, with other mentions being in the 70 range. Also, this post wasn't supposed to be about me, per se, but about how the biggest blogs drove such a small amount of traffic, relative to social media, in general. - Louis Gray
IMHO, it was always the case that you got more comments the more you commented on other people's blogs. Sort of symbiotic relationship. FF seems to just be the next incarnation of the same rule. FF really is just a single portal to view a member's complete content stream and comment inline. - Shawn Smith
It would be interesting to take a look at a relatively new blogger who is active in social media to see what kind of numbers they are getting. - John
I agree with John above. I went through this with my niche blog. Now, my biggest worry is to keep advancing my game so I stay on the other side of the tipping point. Social Media is a part of that game, adding other services, networks, etc are an important part as well. But they're just tools. - John Frost
I'm inclined to think that there is something much bigger going on here. - Kevin
I think what's really going on is web browsing behavior is changing. People are less inclined to click on blog links. I think louis is right - folks are relying on aggregators and search engines to find content, or they're in their reader subscribed to so many blogs following the links within articles is less appealing. - Jason Kaneshiro
I think there is a point at which what Louis says is true, but it's after his blog "arrived" in a sense. After all, a link from Mashable that only give him 77 readers isn't much when he's getting 3,000 visitors from Google that same day. But it's a ton when no one knows who he is (including Google). I agree with John above about the "Tipping Point." - Bob Caswell
Great piece describing the changing landscape for how blogs are discovered and read. Interesting that the #1 and #3 blogs that drove your referrals were posts that themselves were powered by Techmeme and Digg. You indirectly got the benefit through those services. - Hutch Carpenter
i think i have to agree here. i used to find all kinds of new sites through post links but rarely click out of google reader unless i want to comment these days. ff and twitter drive me to more new sites now. - Steve Long
This applies to those people in the thick of the blogosphere and social media, NOT to the rest of the people on the Web who don't know what all this newfangled Web 2.0 stuff is. And quite frankly, that's a good 99% of the people getting online. - Wendy
I believe I agree with the change of discovery of content, but in the end it's still a link whether it's from a blog or from an aggregator such as FriendFeed - I still click on a link. We are simply adding multiple layers (shared thru Google Reader -> FriendFeed -> actual content). - simonpure
There's no irony of it being on Techmeme. I said that's where many people find their news... so it shows the system works. - Louis Gray
Links are still *extremely* important. Your 'Google/Organic' results wouldn't have happened unless you'd established yourself as a hub and authority in your 'neighborhood'. The only way Google understands this is by looking at links: quality and quantity. In addition, you don't get full credit for links right away. It takes time for Google to fully weight the links you have, thus avoiding ephemeral link gaming strategies. - AJ Kohn
Louis, great article on the sliding landscape of traffic aggregration, but I didn't see you make mention of the quality of your visits - only volume. SU for instance offers some great volume, but I'm not seeing a lot of stickiness from that source. However, I do see the smaller referers seem to build longer lasting communities - and yes FriendFeed has offered some great interaction. - ChangeForge via twhirl
