Indeed. I tried to explain this truth to my employer once. He didn't get it. Now he's not my employer, and their site's traffic plummeted to 30% of what it was when I "spent half my day farting around".

Farting around isn't. It's accessing inspiration. It's competitive research. It's market research. It's natural link-building. It's accessing actionable information. It's expanding your mind to think outside the box of your perceptions. It's relationship-building. It's really important, even though it's difficult to forecast the ROI of such "R&D"

Thanks Steve!

You got me thinking about a related issue -- if links that sent referral traffic were VALUED more than links that didn't, one could easily game the system by sending mechanical turk traffic through a link, or something similar... so if that's a factor, it's likely an irrelevant one.

Kind regards!

If a link exists, and nobody clicks on it, could it still be valuable for SEO?

Say I have 1000 links on 500 sites with Domain Authority ranging from 35 to 80. Let's pretend that 900 of those links generate referral traffic. Let's assume that the remaining 100 links are spread between 10 domains of the 500, but nobody ever clicks on them. Are they still valuable? Should an SEO seek to earn more links like those, even though they don't earn referral traffic?

Does Google take referral data into account in evaluating links?

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