What Long Tail? Only 1% of Domains Drive 70% of Traffic to B2B and B2C Websites
Rand Fishkin recently wrote a blog post titled, “Is There a Long Tail to Referral Traffic?” In the post he shared findings of his analysis of referral traffic to four websites.
Conductor, an SEO technology company, decided to take up Fishkin’s challenge to anyone willing to delve deeper into the topic of referral traffic and the long tail. Its findings from looking at more than 31 million referral visits to a mix of B2B and B2C websites over a three-month period yielded strong support for the idea that only a small percentage of domains drive a huge percentage of referral traffic.
The setup
Here was Fishkin’s assumption: “I surmised that only ~20% of the referrals that the average website receives comes from the tail of the distribution curve, whilst Matt [Brown] felt that number should be considerably larger.”
This is what he found for the top referring domains for SEOmoz.org, Inbound.org, Everywhereist.com andMoz.com, courtesy of Conductor:
The traffic types
Conductor’s analysis comprised the following non-organic search referral traffic types:
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