Inbound Links

How many does it take to become primary lead source?

[theadvocate]

We get 80% of our search engine traffic from Google. For those of you with a very high number of links, could you please tell us the percentages of leads from inbound links vs search engines? I know it will vary based on quality of links and other factors, just looking for a ballpark.

For example, we have one site with 200 inbound links and 70% of traffic comes search engines and 25% from inbound links.

While search engines are great and provide the majority of traffic, I am trying to get a very rough idea of how many links it will take before the majority of our traffic comes from inbound links. 1000? 2000?

Thanks

[vitaplease]

average general ballpark for France: (use Google translate for English)

[revue-referencement.com...]

50% comes from links.

85% of search engine referrals for me come from Google and its partners.

I have approx. 1500 pages.
I would guess less than 15%-20% of traffic for my site is coming from external inbound links.

Problem is statistics can get troubled.

[webmasterworld.com...]

[Brett_Tabke]

Nice reply VitaPlease. I would have to say ditto completely. The number of referrals coming in from nonse sources has been failing steadily for several years. That's very troubling because the over all number of se referrals has been falling too (more spread out among smaller sites and the lions share going to the corporations).

[percentages]

Inbound links about 2%, Google & partners 85%, MSN 12%, others....who gives a hoot....all combined about 1%, mainly AV and a few Lycos. I don't pay for sponsored listing anywhere.

[theadvocate]

Thanks for the answers. I know nothing will ever beat targeted search engine queries, and they probably shouldn't, but our goal is to get thousands of inbound links so hopefully we are not so dependent on any one engine if there is a problem. (I know. Who isn't?) ;)

[rik]

My site receives about 10,000 visitors a month:
40% from SE's - variable and decreasing
40% from linked sites (about 900)- steady climbing
20% from revisits - slowly climbing.

I pay since 2 years utmost attention to devellop links from linked sites because the past showed very irregular behaviour by AltaVista and Google, causing wild fluctuations and jumpy results. At the other hand, a link is a very steady source, depending on profile and value of the linked site. In my view an insurance against the centralised power of Google.

If you depend too much from just one SE = dangerous, no matter how 'good' he is.

[europeforvisitors]

I get most of my referrals from search engines (mostly Google and Yahoo, but with a significant contribution from Ask Jeeves and MSN). And while I do have inbound links from some very well-known and respected sites in my category, I seldom get more than half a dozen referrals a day from the best of them. OTOH, some of the smaller sites do send a steady 1-2 referrals every day--not enough to be significant, but welcome nevertheless.

Why don't I get more traffic from inbound links? I think it's because most sites place links on a "links" page instead of using them in context. I know that I send a lot of traffic to other sites, and I'm sure it's because I'm linking from articles or directory pages on specific topics. (In other words, a user finds my article on blue widgets in Google, then uses the article's links to visit other sources of information on blue widgets.)