How much traffic do Links send??

[lloyd]

Does anyone know the percentage of users links send to sites.
Is there any info on this.

Many thanks

[dazz]

really does depend on where the link is from, I have some links that bring in about 20-30 users per day, a few that bring in 5-10 and some that is 1 per month if im lucky.

[DaveN]

lloyd

ditto here

A link on a busy, themed website or webring brings alot more than a link in someones blog or guest book.

DaveN

[IanTurner]

My view is that a really good site should be getting 40-50% of all its visitors from links.

Links in general provide steady traffic without the fluctuation from search engine results.

[angiolo]

> My view is that a really good site should be getting 40-50% of all its visitors from links.

Exactly!
On launching a new site you get most of the vistors from Directories and search engines, but in the long period links are very important and count for half of the visitors.

Unfortunately it is not so easy to get free links. The best links come from specialized-niche portals and usually you have to pay to be in.

[lloyd]

Thanks for the replies guys.

So in general, links bring in 40 to 50% of traffic for well established sites.

But across the board what is the average for most sites.

Also talking about Search Engines/Directories, for established sites, how much traffic do they send. Anyone got any figures for that. Obviously new sites would get an initial surge.

[hobbnet]

With one site in particular I have had great returns from reciprocal linking. About 80% of my sites traffic over the past 5 months has come from links on other websites.

One site I swapped links with has sent me almost as many hits as google has and I have decent placement on google for my keyword (Right now I believe I am listed 11th for the keyword, which, according to overture search term suggestion tool, got searched for 45,780 times last month)

Just find some highly trafficed sites and really twist their arm to get your site listed high on their "Links" page.

HTH

[Brad]

There are fan sites and hobby sites and other kinds of personal websites that get the majority of their traffic from links and small directories. These sites are totally unoptimized for search engines because the owners know nothing about this.

It all depends on what size pond you swim in.

[Kaspian]

I can usually get 1,000-3,000 extra visits per day on my new articles that go up each day from traffic through blogs and whatnot, but I still look at links more as a means to boost link pop for long term search engine performance than for raw traffic off of that link. I'm not complaining mind you, but I prefer to think long term at the end of the day.

[richlowe]

I get quite a bit of traffic from links, which I've gotten by allowing other sites to republish articles as long as they include a link to my site. I'd say about half of my traffic comes from links.

Richard Lowe

[nym_fan]

This is a great question.

I have never really seen a general statement on how much traffic links bring a site. I think it really various on the site and the type of links it has.

From my experience, when I have been "picky" or selective on my link exchanges, I usually get 50-70% of my traffic from links and the rest is from search engines (where I am ranked well due to the links) so you could almost say 100% of my traffic is from linking :)

[Bentler]

I get around 30% referrals from links, mostly in small increments from hundreds of sites. Except this month we had a URL mentioned in a Parade magazine article & did maybe 40%. The biggest chunks and percentages come from search engines and "no referrer" though.

[Mohamed_E]

I just looked at the July stats for my site. Roughly 80% of the traffic comes from search engines (almost exclusively google and yahoo), 20% from links.

42% of the links traffic comes from just three sites, with a very few links not sending any traffic at all, many others sending less than five hits. Makes me wonder about the time I spent getting them, but they add up, and by contributing to PR help with the search engines.

Another 9% of the links traffic comes from various forums, either from explicit links in postings or from my profile.

I contributed a page to another site, it has sent me about 4% of the link traffic (good news!) but handily beats my similar page in the SERPs (bad news!). All in all I feel that it increases my visibility, hence is worthwhile.

[dukeblue219]

I'm getting about 50% of my traffic from links, and the rest almost entirely from Google. Well I should say that that is 50% of the visitors who have a referrer, so it's a little less for all visitors, about 40%.

I just got a really good bump up in Google traffic from the last update, so my links are not doing as much, but then better SE results means more sites will find and link to you, and more links means a higher PageRank on Google, so it's all a big cycle.

[rogerd]

Lloyd, to echo the caution of other posters, you can't really generalize and say there's an optimum or typical percent of traffic from links. As others noted it depends on the category of the site and other factors.

A lot depends on effort, too. If a webmaster devotes a few hundred hours to generating good links, he'll get more link traffic than one who waits for the links to happen on their own.

Time spend getting links is well spent - it diversifies the traffic base of the site, and, of course, has a beneficial effect on searches, too.