Social Bookmarking for SEO
I have been using social bookmarking to boost my website SEO performance. Many SEO practitioners believed that social book marking only significantly boosted website positioning on SERP for short period, after which it will sink back down. Whilst it is true, by my experience it is worth to do, and with a little more sweat sustainability is also possible. I personally think that the buzz dragging many to leave social bookmarking as a beneficial situation.
Lately I am start seeing researches telling that some social bookmarking sites applied NO-FOLLOW policy. No-follow is a non-standard HTML directive telling search engine robots to not follow nor to index certain link. It locks functionality of social bookmarking sites to only human visitors, who see the link, find it interesting, and decide to click. It is implemented to protect search engines’ interest in providing valuable information in their SERP, against webmasters and SEO people who then to abuse social bookmarking sites.
Whilst websites are still benefiting real traffic from human visitors attracted by link placement on social bookmarking sites, impact on using social bookmarking sites as SEO agent is no longer directly beneficial. Websites are no longer getting authority boost from having numerous deep-link from social bookmarking sites which themselves considered as authority source by almost all search engines.
However there are a number of social bookmarking which – for certain reasons – are against the NO-FOLLOW approach. Following are some of them. Good thing is that they are also the most important ones.
Listible is a newer social bookmarking site, and it is very random. You can start a list about anything from TV theme songs to Firefox extensions. Users can then rate items and leave their comments.
Furl, one of the services offered by LookSmart, allows you to copy web pages and then save, search, and share them. This social bookmarking site is great for everything from job searches to research papers to shopping lists. You can access Furl from any computer, and your favorites are always accessible.
Yahoo My Web 2.0 Beta is a social search engine, meaning that people and the search engine technology work in harmony to create the optimum search experience. You can browse by keyword or search out interesting subjects. It offers you a way to bookmark and network simultaneously.
Propeller is a hybrid of social bookmarking and social news sharing, with a voting system like Digg and hot stories, but it’s also owned by AOL, uses organic links in its stories, and also includes bookmark style tagging.
Flickr gives social bookmarking a different spin – the site is all about photos. You can upload and tag your favorites, and then other users can bookmark them and share them with their friends. You can even leave comments as to why you like or do not like a particular image. Flickr lets its users place an HTML link in their photo descriptions – perfect for high rankings and relevant link juice.
Digg.com can get a little crazy and confusing, since it is open for anyone to post sites and leave comments. The users of Digg.com are not shy about telling the world how they feel about different sites (especially if your story or ‘bookmark’ makes the homepage after receiving enough votes), and most of the posts are featured around technology items.
Technorati Faves is a great place to bookmark sites on an authority social site without having the use of NoFollow cast a shadow on your links.
Slashdot is the original when it comes to social bookmarking sites. Slashdot offers both personal bookmarks and summaries of stories which may or may not be approved to make it to the homepage. Users can submit links and stories and have other users leave comments. Submissions do have to be pre-approved, which is a downside for some users.
Searchles is a social bookmarking oriented search engine with tagging, video upload, groups and voting. It’s also run by a search company, DumbFind, so they’ve made it extra search engine friendly.
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