Google Is Becoming Less And Less Relevant

I popped by Lynn Terry’s Internet Marketing Blog a few minutes ago and saw her December Blog Stats post. Lynn’s a bit of an exhibitionist *grin* with her traffic stats and loves to show off the main traffic referrers, with some nice personal analysis thrown in for good measure.

Here’s what I find most interesting about her Clicknewz traffic:

As I mentioned earlier, Google has always been my top referrer, meaning the one site that sent more unique visitors to my blog than any other. Up until November, that is - when StumbleUpon moved up in the stats and took over.

In December, StumbleUpon sent 7,439 visitors, while Google only sent 5,004. Both of those numbers are up by approximately 35% from the prior month.

This is consistent with discussions I’ve had with quite a few webmasters over the past few months: Socal networking and bookmarking is rapidly becomming a major source of traffic for their sites. In fact, some webmasters are at the point where they have completely given up on SEO in favor of social traffic.

This is right in tune with what many others and myself have been preaching for years - write for your readers and not for the search engines.