Less Value from Linking?

Louis Gray of LouisGray.com says he detects a decline in the effectiveness of "linking" as a driver of blog site traffic. Taking a look at traffic to his own site, he now finds "traffic from other blogs to be driving an ever-declining percentage of visits to my site, swamped by social media tools, aggregation sites, and of course, Google search."

People seem to be relying more on news aggregators and RSS feeds.

I'd have to agree. On this site, something like 68 percent of visitors arrive from a search engine site, about 23 percent from referring sites and about nine percent direct.

My personal interest in traffic drivers is as a professional journalist of more than 25 years. Since more of what we do is moving to online delivery, with more of the readership on a story by story basis, irrespective of the brand name packaging we used to emphasize, I'm always interested in how the craft of journalism is evolving.

I used to spend more time embedding links and tagging. These days I do so quite rarely. Mostly, I just put up the posts and am done with it. Of course, I've also stopped using instant messaging as well, Skype for calling and just about any other related applications as well.

I find I am too busy to keep testing many new applications; tired of having to adopt new behaviors. I'm even spending lots less time on Facebook.

Of the new things I've tried recently, Lypp, the Web-based conferencing tool, has proven most useful. It is even delightful. There's still a continuous stream of interesting tools. I just have gotten to the point where getting my work done matters more than exploring lots of new apps. Lypp actually helps me get my work done.