Should I link to del.icio.us, mag.no.lia, digg and the others

[Hippocrates]

Would you recommend giving the customer the option of bookmarking products to del.icio.us, mag.no.lia, digg, stumpleupon and any of the others of these sort of bookmark-sites?
There's an awful lot of them it seems.

Will it maybe clutter up the product page too much and add confusion?
Do people even use these things?
I could be a way of getting some indbound links.
What do you think of this?
Thanks.

[ByronM]

Your luck/mileage/success will vary.

PR on those links isn't worth much. Traffic is very light. How much is your time worth to implement those changes & make them work vs marketing or copy-editing to make your site better in other areas?

To me, it ads clutter and gives you "leaks" to your competitors. You want to sell to the customer, not necessarily have gateways for them to find other comparable products.

On the flip side, some people will push your links like no tomorrow but the chances of that are slim to none vs the cost of getting everything going.

Are you selling products that target the "social"?

[Hippocrates]

Thanks. Yeah I'm not sure about all this.
I tend to think it'll clutter things too much.
Frankly, I never use those bookmarking sites myself, but I'm not in the US and have no clear idea on how popular those things are there (where I beleive they originate).

I'm sure you're right about the low PR for those links.

We sell fabrics and patterns for sewing.

[ByronM]

For such a niche i wouldn't integrate the bookmark functionality in your site but you could login to those places and create bookmark/links that are shared that focus around your topic. Search engines will use that to find new pages and whatnot.

HOWEVER time is probably better spent on building sitemaps, using google/yahoo/msn webmaster tools to understand your traffic and market around that!

[Hippocrates]

I think you're right about how to spend the time best and as you point our our products are not really in the social-category.
Thanks a lot for your time ! :-)