6 replies to this topic

[Asha]

Is social bookmarking a link building technique? I have seen that it increases the traffic to website very easily, and also has links to our website. Can this way be said under link building technique?

[Randy]

Possibly.

But many if not most social bookmarking sites do everything they can do to block link popularity transfer. They don't want to become the fodder for the link mongers like so many others have become by not putting protections in place.

[Dharmesh Shah]

Agreed. More specifically, the following is what makes this strategy not effective:

1. Social bookmarking sites often use "nofollow" links, which signals to the search engines that the links should not be considered in calculating page authority.

2. Social bookmarking sites have a lot of links on the home page. So, even if you did get some link value it would be marginal (as the value is a function of the number of links on the page)

3. Even if you did get link authority, the benfit is temporary as many of the sites have a high ranking "front/popular" page -- but links "roll off" of these pages to lower-ranked internal pages over time anyways.

In short, it's not particularly effective to use social bookmarking sites to build SEO. You might get some traffic, but unlikely that you'll get long-term SEO value.

My two cents.

Possibly.

But many if not most social bookmarking sites do everything they can do to block link popularity transfer. They don't want to become the fodder for the link mongers like so many others have become by not putting protections in place.

[qwerty]

The immediate gain from being listed on a social bookmarking site is traffic -- sometimes too much traffic, and almost always untargeted traffic. However, there can be a secondary gain in link pop if, for example, the people who find the link on the social bookmarking site then write a blog post about it.

[dragonlady7]

So it seems to me, reading qwerty's post above, that using social networking sites would not be terribly effective as an SEO policy, but would be effective as part of a PR campaign, IF your product/page was the sort of thing that a 1) community of bloggers who 2) frequent that social networking site would 3) find relevant and would, 4) themselves, blog.
That's four contingencies, which is kind of a lot. And even if a ton of great bloggers thought your site was awesome and linked to it, many of them would only do so in the text of a post, which would scroll off their front page within a matter of days in most cases.

BUT, they would have heard of you. From a PR point of view, this could be great: I know I've gone to websites and bought things and indeed become a regular customer just from having seen the link on a blog.
But, did the blogger find that link on a social networking site?

It seems a dicey proposition. You'd have to target it really well. Which would take a lot of time and effort.
Probably not a lot of payoff for the amount of effort you'd have to put in to get any results at all...

[Jill]

I would say that sums it up nicely, DL7.

(And welcome back! )

[tamar]

Like dragonlady says:

IF your product/page was the sort of thing that a 1) community of bloggers who 2) frequent that social networking site would 3) find relevant and would, 4) themselves, blog.

I happen to read a lot of blogs and articles that are heavily influenced by social media. The blogs will give credit to the original content, whereas the news articles typically do not. There is also another fact to consider: the community of bloggers don't necessarily "frequent" the social networking sites. They will venture to the front page (and possibly 2 or 3 pages deep) in search of stories, or they will get their intel via tips that are mailed directly to them. Therefore, social bookmarking is a lot about promotion (which social media users don't like as it could be spammy). For that kind of visibility that you're looking for, you really need to have great content that you actively promote so that it appears on the front page of these social media sites and consequently might make it to other sites and blogs.