The Power of the Passed Link

On the web today are two little blurbs about the power of passed links.TechCrunch notes:

The other reason Google needed to establish its own social stream [Buzz] pronto is that links passed through social sharing are beginning to rival search as a primary driver of traffic for many sites.  Part of Google’s prowess stems from the fact that it is the largest referrer of traffic to many other Websites. It doesn’t want to lose that status to social sharing streams such as Facebook or Twitter

And ReadWriteWeb mentions:

We’ve spent some time recently looking at how Facebook has become a bigger driver of traffic to online news than news portals like MyYahoo or Google News, and our initial suspicionswere confirmed with some data by the folks at HitWise

These are far from the first posts on this dynamic and they won’t be the last. But the implications are huge.

SEO has long been the dominant tactic of any site to grow traffic. But now passed links—in particular for more dynamic, real-time sites (think media instead of reference, i.e. Wikipedia)—are steadily becoming a bigger factor. This is a sea change and it will be vitally important for publishers to react and optimize their sites for this new web dynamic.

Needless to say, we think that Grogger is the best way to become a social publisher, with an audience that is really engaged with–and sharing links to–your content.

UPDATE: Responding to Idary’s comment:

Hell yeah, Grogger is all about getting such links going.

We start by encouraging users to sign in via social networks:

Then once logged in, we make it easy for them to send out links to those networks with every action they take:

So we make it technically very easy to produce links.

But more importantly, because users feel the community and ownership over the content in a way unique to the crowdsourcing ethos we produce with our customers, they want to share those links.