One of the challenges I face in my job is the paucity of decent data to support my theories of how people behave out there on the web. I like to be able to challenge my assumptions and this can only be done with the right tools and a decent set of results. Recently I did pick up a good dataset that proved a long held suspicion:

Links from popular sites do not deliver a sustained increase in visitor numbers

I overhear people talking about links 'driving traffic' to client's websites all the time so have often wondered what a link is worth in terms of additional visitors. Given that a principle of my current work is that attracting attention from popular sites is a way to become part of a 'network neighbourhood' I've wanted to put this to the test. I spotted this comment ages ago on a fairly high profile UK political blog that said:

"... we all know that such linkage doesn't do that much for traffic (Guardian, BBC and Telegraph all worth a spike of an extra c.200-300 visitors, if that)."

A link from a high profile domain is good for your natural search rankings as Google likes it when a high authority site links to you. Is it good for your visitor numbers though? Here's another post that highlights what actually happens:

"After sitting dormant for 9 months, suddenly someone found the site. And not just someone but a very popular code blog called Ajaxian. In one day the site’s visitors leapt from 0 to 400. The next day the site was picked up by a reddit user. At the end of the day, we had about 35,000 visitors."

This is an extreme case. reddit is all about aggregating content that people will then go on to visit directly; a post here that is voted up will attract high volumes of visits. The point is that after the bump from these referrers traffic settled back down to a low-level. This is all pretty obvious stuff, if your site is not a regularly updated content destination then people, having found it via a link, are probably not going to come back day after day. What about a fairly standard case where a link comes to you from a post on a highly popular site? Are you going to receive thousands of visitors from a site that has tens of thousands of visitors a day? In a word: no. Below is the bump taken from the Google Analytics of a recent project I worked on that received coverage from several very popular sites.

So, unless you experience slashdotting, not only will a link from a popular site not provide a sustained increase in visits it will also not deliver many additional visitors. Referrals are but a distant echo of the attention the post that linked to you received. You have absolutely no way of telling how many people read that post as although you may have a vague idea of the daily visits to the referring site you cannot know how many people actually viewed that post. Once that post has dropped off the front page and disappeared into the mass of content that forms a popular site so the attention disappears. This could be called the content 'decay rate' of a given site and will vary depending on the rapidity with which new content is added. I think most people dedicate most of their attention to certain familiar sites when they're online. If they read a post on a favourite blog they read it in situ and rarely follow a link out.

Check out the site statistics for a few of the very popular Gawker blogs: Gizmodo: average 1.1 pageviews a visit Jalopnik: average 1.6 pageviews a visit io9: average 1.5 pageviews a visit People's attention is extremely limited, even on popular sites. Short of anonymised browsing data becoming available to really figure out what's happening I'd take promises of attracting attention from referrals very lightly.

Update: I've been doing a little more reading and found this post from December 2006 entitled Sharecropping the longtail which makes the following point:

"... web traffic appears to be growing more concentrated in a few sites, not less... what's being concentrated... is not content but the economic value of content. MySpace, Facebook, and many other businesses have realized that they can give away the tools of production but maintain ownership over the resulting products..."

The popularity of social networking sites has meant that increasing numbers of pageviews are concentrated on these domains (though these views are scattered across several million profile pages). I think this bears out what I'm driving at in my post above.

Update: the traffic patterns discussed in this post are indicative of what I'm talking about.