Interest in social bookmarking as an SEO technique has exploded since Google & Bing’s announcement in Dec 2010 that they were incorporating social network signals (e.g. “likes”, “views” “retweets” “+ 1” s etc.) into search engine rankings (see our social media page for more information on this). In fact, Google has actually been using social signals from social bookmarking sites for many years via
Quality social bookmarking is where cooperating groups vote for each other’s URLs to create multiple votes for each URL (typically a site’s homepage) on the top 20 or so social bookmarking sites (delicious, Stumbleupon, Dilgo etc.). This generates traffic from the social networking sites themselves because the URLS get high placements as well as backlinks for SERPS and possible some authority and trust too
Bulk social bookmarking is where multiple “spun” profiles & comments with embedded links are placed on literally thousands of secondary social bookmarking sites to get backlinks. These are typically Pligg, PHPDug or Scuttle based platforms with do-follow links, but limited traffic or authority, and are not heavily moderated by administrators or users
We recommend quality social bookmarking for direct linking to your website (including inner pages) and bulk social bookmarking for energizing, indexing and tiered linking
Issues in social bookmarking SEO
Social bookmarking vs. social networks. It is not clear how Google and Bing’s interest in incorporating social network signals (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) will impact the SEO value of social bookmarking. For now, we recommend using both
Duplicate content filters. Both quality and bulk social bookmarking are multi submission methods so high % uniqueness scores & in addition variations in account details, word count, anchor text, link position, time/date stamps & sentence construction is essential, especially for longer runs (e.g. over 1,000). Google’s duplicate content filters will automatically detect submissions with similarities in content and ignore them otherwise. We use “double nested “spun text staggered submission as standard which is the most effective way to create variations.
Sstaggered submission. Staggered submission is absolutely essential for quality social bookmarking as it is unnatural for a URL – particularly from a commercial enterprise – to suddenly gain lots of votes. On the top social bookmarking sites, it is also very easy for accounts / URLs to be reported to administrators by eagle-eyed users, thereby potentially undoing months if not years of work. For bulk submission, this is far less of an issue.
Content quality. For quality social bookmarking content quality is important. The original content (e.g. home page, blog post, video) needs to have value to attract votes organically, and comments have to look natural, not spammy. For bulk submission, this is far less of an issue.
To follow vs. no-follow. Several of the top social bookmarking sites have switched to no-follow links (notably Digg and Mr Wong) but still provide SEO value via authority, link diversity and traffic generated. For bulk bookmarking us stick to do follow sites only.
Quality vs. bulk bookmarking. Creating thousands of low-quality direct links to your target URL(s) is no longer an effective SEO strategy. We recommend only using very limited direct bulk bookmarking from PR 3+ sites and instead recommend using bulk bookmark submission for energizing, indexing and tiered linking. Quality social bookmarking on the other hand should be used for target URLs such as your own site and quality articles, blog posts or videos.
Proprietary lists. We have developed our own “scrapped” proprietary list of over 1,000 social bookmarking sites for energizing, indexing & tiering as well as direct linking. Many of these are PR3+ & captcha protected and we are continually updating /deleting from to ensure all sites are active. Our experience is that the bookmarking lists used by submission software firms (like SE Nuke) and major SEO firms use (e.g. Submit edge) are invariably overused with too many spammy links or with high levels of “no new registrations”, account deletions or dead sites.