[bigiain]

Keep in mind his technique is differentiating himself from "a typical site" - if your plan is to generate genuinely compelling content that other website owners will want to link too, you're automatically (assuming you execute well) going to get a higher percentage of your traffic from referrals than people who's idea of a link building strategy is to approach everybody in related-but-non-competitive-fields and ask them to add reciprocal links buried somewhere down in a "links" page that nobody ever visits, never mind actually floows links from...

Not that those links aren't valuable - they'll add pagerank for you, and if you can use your own carefully chosen anchor text you don't need terribly many of them to make a page rank very highly for a very narrow "long tail" search query, but you don't acutally expect any inbound traffic from that sort of backlink. The sort of backlink the article is suggesting is different, it _is_ going to generate referral traffic - other websites aren't going to link to your "great content" unless they're expecting and intending their visitors follow those links to your site.

Like you say, 80% of traffic from search _is_ "typical", that's because "typical sites" don't in general have compelling linkable content (except perhaps by accident or because some SEO sold them on "linkbait").

(like you say upthread "depending on the details", I'm not sure why the parent post to this is getting downvoted...)