Louis Gray analyzed his referral traffic trends, saw that blogs were delivering a declining percentage of traffic to his site and came to the conclusion that blog linking is less important than it used to be; instead he argues that social media sites are increasing in importance.

While I agree with the ultimate conclusion that waiting for Scoble or Mashable links is a flawed strategy, Louis’s statement of links being less important is way off-base. Links are an online currency and a key driver of your search engine ranking – a statement backed up by experts such as Debra Mastaler and Jeff Jarvis – and no one can claim that search traffic’s importance.

If Louis is like other top blog sites we’ve analyzed, he’s missing a huge link and traffic opportunity. In the month of June, we loaded the publicly available RSS feeds for several top blog sites into our service to analyze how much re-use was occurring, and more importantly for this discussion, the percentage of re-use that did not link back.

As you can see from the figure below, many of the top blog sites are leaving (link) money on the table.

Louis (and anyone else), let us help you increase your blog link traffic by giving you a web-wide view of your link opportunities and the tools to secure them.