Social Bookmarking- A Useful Tool?

Social Bookmarking- A Useful Tool

Social bookmarking is still one of the best ways of generating free quality backlinks from sites with a greater page rank than your own site. However, it is important to see social bookmarking as a way of generating backlinks rather than traffic in most cases. If your site is not video based and does not have up to date news content that is likely to go viral then the social bookmarking traffic is likely to be of little benefit compared to the backlinks generated. Social bookmarking traffic is often low quality browsing traffic rather than people that are genuinely interested in your site. Subsequently, social bookmarking traffic also produces high bounce rates and incredibly low conversion rates.

While in the past, submitting to as many of the main social bookmarking sites would have had a benefit to your site no matter which of the directories you submitted to, that is definitely no longer the case. It is no worth submitting to a social bookmarking site unless it has a page of 5 or above. You can use the tool at : http://www.top25web.com/pagerank to check the page rank of potential bookmarking sites. My two favourite and most successful bookmarking sites are Stumble Upon and Digg.

Finally, do not abuse the system. While submitting every single page in your site to the social bookmarking sites may seem like a good idea and in the short term will bring results, it is a bad idea. In the whole term it will eventually harm your ranking once Google realises your site has so many links come from the same site. Moreover, in the wider picture, people who submit their whole site to the social bookmarking site will cause Google to demote the social bookmarking sites and their benefits will be lost forever.