In a world with tons of bots, index spiders and other forms of false traffic, it can be frustrating to extract the best sources for true, organic traffic. With the internet becoming more and more competitive, it comes as no surprise that the difficulty for obtaining legitimate links and referrals is ever increasing. Many people try to circumvent these struggles by purchasing traffic or links, but these black-hat tactics rarely ever pay off – and can land you in serious trouble with search engines. So the question begs: which referral links actually send real traffic? We’ll discuss the three main sources of organic referral traffic in the following article, so that you can make the best decision for your business or site.

News Aggregators

There are plenty of news-related blogs and sites out there, but how many actually drive real traffic to other sources? As it turns out, very few of them truly do. When it comes to news aggregation services, however, it is a different story. Once these sources start pinging URLs to your website, you are virtually guaranteed to receive a heaping of organic traffic to your blog posts, products and other pages. Sites such as Reddit use popularity features to boost the most desirable links to the top; the better your link does with a smaller audience, the more exposure it will ultimately receive from the broader community. With many different news aggregators in the business, you’re sure to have a great return on investment when you dedicate yourself to referral traffic in this arena.

Being Linked to as a Resource

Lots of notable sites out there provide reviews of techniques or products. As a result, many helpful and notable sources for information get mentioned and, better yet, get referral traffic. Sites such as Buzzfeed and others will create comprehensive how-tos or reviews; these pieces can’t be controlled by you, but you can boost your likelihood of being mentioned in one of these by improving the quality of your own resources. After you have boosted your content to its best quality, simply lay back and wait for the referrals. You may not receive many at first, but time will be the ultimate vindicator of your work.

Independent Reviews

As mentioned prior, reviews are a common source of referral traffic. When it comes to independent and third-party review sites, though, the potential for legitimate referral traffic is even greater. Have an opinion on a product, or are offering a product? In either case, you can be a helpful assistant to others by providing plenty of different tidbits to those who need it. From product specs to ease of use reviews, your details can be converted into valuable link juice. As with the resource links, you won’t have much influence over how often you are mentioned, but you can boost the likelihood of being picked up by ensuring that the quality of your work is on par with that of your best peers. As one famous infomercial and product reviewer once said, “set it and forget it!”.