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What is 'social bookmarking'?

by Johnathan
26 replies
Hi,

I've seen people talk about 'social bookmarking' and that you should do it, but what exactly is it, and how does it benefit you?

I.e., say I had a website "abcde.com".

If I 'social bookmarked' that site, say on 30 sites,
a) What does that 'mean'?
b) What 'benefit' does it have to my site? (Just PR/backlink/google juice?) Or do 'real' people actually visit my site because it is 'bookmarked'?
c) Anyway of making bookmarks 'more' valuable?

Thanks!
#bookmarking #ocial
  • Profile picture of the author patJ
    Ever heard of del.icio.us? Dude.. it even got its own wikipedia page. Social bookmarking - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

    a) your bookmarks are shared in a network.
    b) backlinks and people visiting your site
    c) bookmark more than once.
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  • Profile picture of the author Johnathan
    Hi,

    Yes -- I've heard of "del.icio.us", digg, etc, etc, but never really got into it. (I.e., like I've heard of e-bay, but personally never sold an item on e-bay, etc, so I wouldn't really understand the process of getting set up on it, etc, etc).

    So I was just wondering from someone who has used 'bookmarking', how effective has it been in terms of increasing traffic/sales/etc? (i.e., any measurable results?)

    As well -- I don't quite "get" how it works. Is it basically people who visit these "news" websites simply have "bookmarks" (say like firefox) in a side panel or something? If so, I'm assuming how you become popular is people simply telling others about the site, and them visiting it too?
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  • Profile picture of the author Jason_V
    Digg, will be of little use anymore. They're now using the no follow tag. Only if your story makes front page will the do follow tag be used on your submission.

    Social bookmarking at sites that have do follow tags, will get you backlinks. Yes, you can also get traffic from people who click on your bookmarked sites. The more do follow backlinks your site has the higher you'll move in search engine rankings.

    If you are fortunate enough to get on the first page of a site like Digg then yes you will get a lot of traffic for that day too.

    I'd suggest you go to http://www.socialmarker.com and sign up, it's free. After you sign up to all the sites, you can social bookmark your site to multiple social bookmarking sites from one place.
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  • Profile picture of the author acedalright
    Dofollow bookmarking is the real key.

    Getting bookmarks from dofollow sites and increasing your link pop.

    Mass submission isn't an effective strategy as all titles are duplicate and therefor sink out of the search results

    Manual bookmarking is far more effective
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  • Profile picture of the author digidoodles
    Where is James when you need him?

    Manual bookmarking... is manual bookmarking. It is no more effective or less effective. Well, it's less effective in that you can't generate as many bookmarks as you can via automation. And, we all know, the more bookmarks, the more traffic, the more moohlah.

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  • Profile picture of the author TheRichJerksNet
    What I find that is not so funny is the misinformation posted by people...

    * Do Follow & No Follow Means Nothing!! - You should be posting on any site and who cares if it is do follow or not. Digg being no follow means nothing, I wish people would stop giving bad advice and stop acting like they know something they do not.

    - Digg, Clipmarks, ArticlesBase, SearchWarp, and many others are no follow and guess what ? They are top sites that "CAN AND DO" help you get top listings and increase your rankings in the search engines.

    - Mass submissions is a very good thing and your competition is doing it, this is why your competition is making more money and beating you in the search engines.

    - Bookmarking is not just for backlinks, yes you can get traffic from bookmarks and again if you choose to ignore no follow sites then your competition has one up on you... Congrats on helping your competition and making their job easier.

    Since nobody has really answered the OP what social bookmarking is I will explain it.

    Social Bookmarking is the ability to take:

    * Your website url (this can be any url)
    * A title that you create
    * A description that you create
    * Keywords that you write up

    And add these to social bookmarking websites, there are thousands of social bookmarking websites but for this example we will take faves.com.

    You go to faves.com and signup for an account, once you verify your email address you can login the account and setup your profile. Setup your profile with a picture, description, and add your main domain name.

    Once you have this done then you want to add some bookmarks. There are several ways to do this, either by using the onsite form or by using the browser bookmark icon. For this example we are going to use their online site form.

    You are logged in and you go to add faves and see a form. This form will ask you for a URL, add your website url and faves will pull a image from that site to use (you can choose to use no image). Next you will add your title, your title should contain keywords you are wanting to target. Next you will add a description of the url you are bookmarking, description can contain keywords also. Next you will add your tags, the tags are the keywords or keyphrases you are wanting to target with this url.

    Once filled out you can click on the save button and this bookmark will now show up on your profile and everyone can see it, including search engines.

    You will want to bookmark several url's but do not spam your account by adding all your own sites at one time. Add some sites you favor or sites you like and in between those slowly add your urls.

    When you have some bookmarks showing on your profile you will want to help spread the word by making a few friend request. Visit others profiles that interest you and attempt to make friends with them by clicking on the friends link. You can post comments on your friends bookmarks and your friend can comment on yours.

    Now what good does this do you ? It will help you in your rankings in the search engines as these are backlinks that are pointing to your url's. It does not matter if they are do follow or no follow, you still can enjoy increased rankings.

    There is way more to bookmarking but this is the basics to help answer your question....

    James
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    • Profile picture of the author Jason_V
      Originally Posted by TheRichJerksNet View Post

      What I find that is not so funny is the misinformation posted by people...

      * Do Follow & No Follow Means Nothing!! - You should be posting on any site and who cares if it is do follow or not. Digg being no follow means nothing, I wish people would stop giving bad advice and stop acting like they know something they do not.

      James

      You talk about misinformation, this has got to be the biggest piece of misinformation I've ever seen.

      • Google states that their engine takes "nofollow" literally and does not "follow" the link at all. However, experiments conducted by SEOs show conflicting results. These studies reveal that Google does follow the link, but does not index the linked-to page, unless it was in Google's index already for other reasons (such as other, non-nofollow links that point to the page).[7][8]
      • Yahoo! "follows it", but excludes it from their ranking calculation.
      • Bing respects "nofollow" as regards not counting the link in their ranking, but it is not proven whether or not Bing follows the link.
      • Ask.com ignores the attribute altogether.[citation needed]
      So, I stand by what I say that submitting to Digg, unless you have a front page worthy story, is about useless. It won't index your site, and it won't count towards your site's ranking. You ask "Who cares if it's do follow or no follow" well, I'd say just about anyone who wants Google to recognize the backlink and have it count towards your search engine rankings and if you want to get a new site indexed.
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      • Profile picture of the author TheRichJerksNet
        Originally Posted by Jason_V View Post

        You talk about misinformation, this has got to be the biggest piece of misinformation I've ever seen.

        • Google states that their engine takes "nofollow" literally and does not "follow" the link at all. However, experiments conducted by SEOs show conflicting results. These studies reveal that Google does follow the link, but does not index the linked-to page, unless it was in Google's index already for other reasons (such as other, non-nofollow links that point to the page).[7][8]
        • Yahoo! "follows it", but excludes it from their ranking calculation.
        • Bing respects "nofollow" as regards not counting the link in their ranking, but it is not proven whether or not Bing follows the link.
        • Ask.com ignores the attribute altogether.[citation needed]
        So, I stand by what I say that submitting to Digg, unless you have a front page worthy story, is about useless. It won't index your site, and it won't count towards your site's ranking. You ask "Who cares if it's do follow or no follow" well, I'd say just about anyone who wants Google to recognize the backlink and have it count towards your search engine rankings and if you want to get a new site indexed.
        Stand by your misleading information all you want... I have 300+ customers that proves your post wrong. You can go grab what "google" says all you want.

        The fact is top listings and increased rankings do not lie and no matter how much information you try to pull from someplace else, you will not change that fact.

        You really need to stop acting like an expert on something that you are not an expert on. Let me point out your misleading information since you seem to not understand.

        The more do follow backlinks your site has the higher you'll move in search engine rankings.
        What you posted is False, the fact is the more backlinks you have the higher rankings you will get and it does not matter if it is from do follow or no follow sites.

        James
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  • Profile picture of the author bradleynsmith
    Social bookmarking is powerful stuff.

    In my sig file is the link to my latest Giveaway site, which uses Social Bookmarking, web 2.0 and email dumping strategies to make a powerful JV giveaway event.

    This will take the Giveaway Marketing industry to the next level.

    I'm sick of seeing everyone's subscriber list pumped to others, just to take away their subscribers, when there are people sitting in social networks who would love to participate...

    And watch out for "socially viral" niche giveaways soon using this very technique, it's finally going to get out of the IM scene, something that I said needed to happen since the days when I wrote The Death of JV Giveaways

    As marketers you can use social bookmarking for your own profit -- just be careful of the rules and make sure you respect people in the social networks ! After all, we hate "forum spam", "blog spam" and "email spam".

    Take care but have fun a
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  • Profile picture of the author TheRichJerksNet
    Originally Posted by threatlevelorange View Post

    Interesting debate here between RichJerksNet and Jason V. I'm curious to see how this plays out.
    Yeah especially since there is testimonial after testimonial that proves him wrong...

    James
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    • Profile picture of the author Jason_V
      Originally Posted by TheRichJerksNet View Post

      Yeah especially since there is testimonial after testimonial that proves him wrong...

      James
      Let's see James, I pointed to a source in my last post, here's another one directly out of Google's mouth. Testimonial after testimonial, yet not one link? That's a great way to make a point.

      I'll just copy and paste the whole thing and put a link back to the original:

      There seems to be a common misconception in the webmaster and search engine marketing field that inbound links which use the 'no follow' attribute have no value to the site which they point towards.
      Earlier in the week, Raj Dash commented in a post on Exposing the Invisible Web to Search Engines that in addition to bookmarking and social news sharing, securing links from authority sites such as Wikipedia can help search engines discover sites which they may not have been able to find.
      A reader responded in a comment that this is false:
      Links from Wikipedia will not allow you pages to be seen by search engines, because Wikipedia recently added rel="nofollow" to all of there external links.
      Instead of challenging the reader to an argument on No Follow, I thought that for once and for all, the law needs to be laid down as to how search engines treat the no follow attribute in terms of linking and discovery.
      What better way to do so than to ask the search engines themselves? So I wrote Google's Adam Lasnik (Matt's on vacation), Yahoo's Director of Search Tim Mayer and the Ask.com Search Team to get the lowdown on No Follow directly from the source.
      So, here are the basic No Follow questions and answers, from Google, Ask.com (a surprising response) and Yahoo.
      1. How does your search engine treat the No Follow attribute?
      • Google : The Googlebot does not follow that link.
      • Yahoo : If we find a link we make it available to our algorithms to find new content, whether it has a 'no follow' attribute or not. However, if the 'no follow' attribute is present, it means that no attribution is given to the target from the source of the link.
      • Ask.com : We have never officially supported No Follow, so your questions don't apply to our crawler/ranking.
      2. If a site has no web citations and only has one link pointing to it, and that link is from a Wikipedia entry, would your search engine find that site and index it even though the link uses a No Follow attribute?
      • Yahoo : Yes, the link is available to our crawlers for finding the target. Then the target will be crawled and indexed based on our algorithms.
      • Google : Assuming that link is still no-followed per Wikipedia's current practice, we will not find much less index that page (remember, this is page, not site related; if links to other pages on that site are not no-followed, we will see and potentially index those pages). On a related note, though, and echoing Matt's earlier sentiments... we hope and expect that more and more sites -- including Wikipedia -- will adopt a less-absolute approach to no-follow... expiring no-follows, not applying no-follows to trusted contributors, and so on.
      3. Is there any quality given to sites which attract No Follow links from authority sites, besides the lack of the passing of PageRank, Link Authority or "Search Juice"?
      • Google : Since the Googlebot does not follow no-follow links, this isn't really an issue. [bolded added by me for emphasis]
      • Yahoo : As promised in the semantics for the 'no follow' tag, the anchor text and attribution will not be carried over to the target of a 'no follow' link.

      In conclusion, the commenter was correct about links to pages from Wikipedia some search engines, specifically Google, [bolded added by me for emphasis] but Yahoo and Ask.com both not only follow No Follow, but also make those sites available to their algorithm. Therefore, even links with the No Follow attribute do have value; especially in the counting, but not always authoritative measurement, of backlinks.


      No Follow does not mean that search engines do not see the pages which No Follow attributed links point to, it means in some cases (not Ask.com) link value nor referral attribution is given.


      How Google, Yahoo & Ask.com Treat the No Follow Link Attribute | Search Engine Journal


      In case you didn't notice, this article coes from search engine journal, who I'd consider a pretty serious expert on the issue at hand.

      So, yes you may derive some benefit from no follow links from other search engines. However, I don't really usually give a crap about the other search engines. I really care about Google, as, I believe, most other people in this forum.

      Not to mention everything I said also comes DIRECTLY from Matt Cutts and Google. Unless, of course, you know more about Google than Google and Matt Cutts?
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  • Profile picture of the author Jason_V
    Originally Posted by threatlevelorange View Post

    Jason V, could it be that a plus b does not necessarily equal c in practice?
    Not in my experience. Here's what I did. I found some older blogs. I'm talking 2+ years old. I looked to see if the comments were do follow or no follow. If they were no follow, I then looked at some of the comments. I looked specifically for people who used their name as anchor text with a link back to their site. I then looked to see if Google counted that as a link back to their site. None of them I did this test on, did Google count that as a link back to their site.

    I used many different comments from the same blog and conducted this test. I also used many different blogs to conduct this test.

    As far as indexing goes, I don't know because I never did an experiment submitting my site specifically to all no follow sites to see if it gets indexed or not. Not to mention, I always submit my sitemap to Google anyway, which would obviously skew the results. I'd be willing to bet that if you did not submit your site to Google or any other search engine. If you did no other form of marketing of your site except strictly submitted it to no follow sites, your site would not get indexed by Google.

    If it did, it would probably take weeks maybe even months. Why waste the time on no follow sites, when it takes just as much time to submit to a do follow site as it does a no follow site. As I said, what I'm saying comes directly from Matt Cutts and Google.

    If James or anyone else has evidence otherwise, give me a link, I'd be glad to look into it. I spent a lot of time on trying to understand this no follow and do follow aspect. Everything I looked at, backs up and confirms what I've said.
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    • Profile picture of the author homebizrockstar
      Wow! you guys should debate more often, I learned more from this thread than 6 months reading everything I could get my hands on, online. Thanks for the great info and education!
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      • Profile picture of the author TheRichJerksNet
        Originally Posted by homebizrockstar View Post

        Wow! you guys should debate more often, I learned more from this thread than 6 months reading everything I could get my hands on, online. Thanks for the great info and education!
        The problem is you need to make sure not to listen to some that think they are an expert on something and especially someone that hijacks a thread to prove a point that he is wrong on and give out bad advice that may hurt someone elses business that listens.

        You especially should not listen to someone that still did not answer the OP..

        And especially when that someone even goes to the point of sending harrassing PM's that start out saying " Dude, You have some serious problems. "

        To the OP, your answer is posted on post #7

        To Jason, you really should learn how to respect others threads and stop hijacking them to try and prove a point that you cannot prove because you are no expert.

        To everyone else, please go do your own testing and come to your own results.

        James
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  • Profile picture of the author Amenda Jessera
    Originally Posted by Johnathan View Post

    Hi,

    I've seen people talk about 'social bookmarking' and that you should do it, but what exactly is it, and how does it benefit you?

    I.e., say I had a website "abcde.com".

    If I 'social bookmarked' that site, say on 30 sites,
    a) What does that 'mean'?
    Networking with other people, so, you can share your bookmakrs with others, as well as you can check your favourite sites from any corner of the world where Internet exists.

    Originally Posted by Johnathan View Post

    b) What 'benefit' does it have to my site? (Just PR/backlink/google juice?)
    Your pages will get index sooner as well as you can get few SEO juice too.

    Originally Posted by Johnathan View Post

    Or do 'real' people actually visit my site because it is 'bookmarked'?
    Yes, there are sites where guys are into a lot, specially delicious, that drive direct referal traffic as well as traffic via Yahoo too.

    Originally Posted by Johnathan View Post

    c) Anyway of making bookmarks 'more' valuable?

    Thanks!
    Yes, making bookmarks in more valuable
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  • Profile picture of the author Boda Media
    I do not it makes a lick of difference to be honest...

    I have been a part of ranking sites that have have had no follow links mainly to them, and they have ranked very well...

    They do not pass PR through their no follow tag.. but PR is not worth jack **** anymore..

    You can have pages with crap PR out ranking high PR pages..

    Lots more to contend with then just no follow, do follow rubbish.. A link is a link and the more the merrier.

    I repeat, no follow links do not pass PR.. but IMO who gives a ****..

    take what you will from that statement.
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  • Profile picture of the author Andy
    Google : Assuming that link is still no-followed per Wikipedia's current practice, we will not find much less index that page (remember, this is page, not site related; if links to other pages on that site are not no-followed, we will see and potentially index those pages).

    Is it me or is anyone else wondering if there is anyone at Google who can speak (or write) in English?

    All in all a worthwhile debate. I won't go off on yet another tangentile diatribe on whether the follow-no-follow discussion is relevant here.

    Thanks, James, for the explaination of social bookmarking. I think this not-so-social animal is kinda getting it.

    What I will take from this is social bookmarking seems to have value, however if I participate, I plan on automating the process to an extent. And if I'm bookmarking automatically - what do I really care if the sites are follow or no-follow?

    Certainly even if trying to sqeeze backlink juice from no-follow sites is like sqeezing blood from a stone, there must be some inherent advantage to such a site. I see no real penalties.

    On the other hand, what happens if no-follow tags fall in disfavor? I, for one, see no real advantage to them. Discouraging content spammers? Not hardly. Thus far the only really effective way I've seen to block spammers is human intervention.

    So my remaining question for the moment is... do I need to set up separate accounts for all my pen names?

    God bless,

    Andy
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  • Profile picture of the author JonMills
    Its another form of exposure for your site, product or service
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    • Profile picture of the author James Clark
      Social bookmarking is the practice of saving Bookmarks to a public Web Site and "Tagging" them with keywords. Bookmarking is the habit of saving web sites that you plan to visit at a later date.

      To create a collection of bookmarks you can register with social bookmarking sites, which lets you store tags of your choice and bookmarks of other sites. You can also establish whether they are public or private.

      Social bookmarking dates back a couple of years. It is particularly useful when collecting a bunch of resources that could be used by others. Anyone can participate in social bookmarking.

      Just some food for thought, if Einstein had a computer wouldn't you like to see a list of his bookmarks?



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  • Profile picture of the author sbucciarel
    Banned
    I use Jame's bookmarking service. Works great for getting my sites ranked and takes all the pain out of doing all the bookmarking myself. Here's the url of his WSO

    http://www.warriorforum.com/warrior-...ly-8-77-a.html
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  • Profile picture of the author davidkimball
    I am also new to all of this and glad I found this thread. I did a little web searching and found:

    www dot socialmarker dot com (sorry -- too new to post links).

    Does this do the same thing?

    David
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  • Profile picture of the author MattSteel
    Just another newbie here, saying "Thanks" for all the interesting and "spirited" discussion Jonathon, I too have no idea what social bookmarking is, but then again I am not too heavily into marketing at this stage. But, I do enjoy learning about all this. And to think just a couple of years ago, I never even thought about what I clicked on with Google. Now, I'm obsessed!
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