Overall the biggest source of traffic is. reddit

[Dimitri]

I don't know if it's taken in consideration by Google, or other search engines, but get your site mentioned at a reddit discussion and this is guaranteed tons of traffic.

In my case, it happens 3-4 times a month. And each time, this is instantly 2.000 extra visitors per hours(!) during roughly 24 hours, then it progressively fades during the next days. (my site receives normally around 15.000 visitors per day). One or two months later, it still generates a couple of hundreds of visitors per day.

And surprisingly this traffic generates good Adsense earnings, like 75% of what traffic from search engine is generating.

This is the biggest instant boost of traffic I have ever experienced.

Now, all depends of the kind of site, of reddit discussion, that's why I am posting this in this "foo" category.

[keyplyr]

Reddit has happened several times for me. 7k to 10k page loads in a few hours is pretty noticeable since my personal site only gets between 60k to 70k a day.

However, normally my biggest source of traffic continues to be backlinks, then Google, then Social Media.

[asahback]

Yes reddit is an amazing source of traffic, if the link is pasted in relevant subreddit. You have to handle reddit with care, i got banned from 2 subreddits. Reddit is very strict.

[lucy24]

if the link is pasted in relevant subreddit

I think Dimitri was talking about actual human beings who spontaneously and voluntarily post a link to a page that illustrates something relevant to an ongoing discussion in which they are participating naturally.

Ahem.

[robzilla]

I get a few mentions every now and then, but it's usually low-traffic threads. I did post directly to a fairly popular subreddit once when I had a good piece of content for that community, and thankfully it was well-received; still only about 800 visitors, with a relatively high bounce rate, but it can definitely work. I prefer seeing links pop up naturally though, it's usually a good sign.

[not2easy]

Reddit is very strict.

I think Reddit has enough experience to spot self serving users, the same as most other solid UGC sites. I don't think they are particularly strict, but if they don't use methods to defeat abuse they soon could lose authority and become irrelevant by losing user trust.