SEO Benefits of Social Bookmarks

[driller41]

I am seeing very few social bookmarking sites ranking nowadays, so is there any benefit in social bookmarking websites for SEO or is this tactic now dead?

[tedster]

I haven't tested this, but it seems to me that having lots of people share a bookmark to your site would be an important signal. Google cares more than ever about the social aspects of the web - partly because they couldn't really succeed in-house with it.

So when we think about how Google identifies "brands", for example, I'd think that bookmark sharing would enter into the picture. Now the question is, can you manipulate that? Not so much.

[aristotle]

Most of the social bookmarking sites put a nofollow tag on all outbound links. Most likely that means that any links your create won't boost your sites pagerank. But possibly they could help in other ways, such as branding.

[Rlilly]

If "delicious" is an example of a social bookmarking site we discussing then my personal belief is social book marking does not help one bit.

[londrum]

remember that google's got it's own social bookmarking thing. i assume they must use the data for something.

if ten billion people tag something through google bookmarks, how can they ignore it.

[tedster]

Right - if your focus in SEO is exclusively on link juice, then you're not seeing the emerging picture at Google. Make that the very rapidly emerging picture.

[aristotle]

if ten billion people tag something through google bookmarks, how can they ignore it.

Do you mean ten billion people using the Google Toolbar or Chrome browser to bookmark a site? Or are you referring to a separate Google bookmarking site?

[londrum]

they've got their own google bookmarks thing, just like delicious. completely separate from chrome and the toolbar.
www.google.com/bookmarks

i always think that gmail is good for link juice too, although i havent seen anyone prove it.
if someone emails a link to someone else through gmail, i can't see them ignoring that.
that is as good as a vote, in my book

the old-school link thing was very flawed anyway, because the only people who could actually 'vote' for websites were other website owners -- a very very small percentage of the web's population. (which has now increased somewhat, because lots of normal people control their own web space on blogs and facebook and stuff like that).
what you need is a way for the normal, non-website owning users to be able to vote as well. that is much more useful, because they are the people who actually use the sites.

there are currently only 3 ways that normal, non-website-owning users can 'vote'

1) by visiting and revisiting the sites
we know that google already measures this, through analytics, toolbar, chrome, cookies etc etc...

2) by tagging it in social sites, like delicious, facebook, and stumbleupon etc etc etc. we can assume that google are trying to measure this too, because of their own forays into this field, like google bookmarks

and 3) by talking about the sites to other people in their emails. i assume that google tracks this too, by logging URLs that pass through gmail.

those three things are the future of SEO, i reckon

[kidder]

Hey thats in interesting point londrum, it may trigger a wave of gmail spam. I think Twitter certainly helps and I've said that here in the past.

[MrFewkes]

"Right - if your focus in SEO is exclusively on link juice, then you're not seeing the emerging picture at Google. Make that the very rapidly emerging picture.
"

Tedster - I think I have made that my picture - which is why I am trying "non-link juice" tactics. Doesnt work though.

I can say that I used SE N* to test a theory on the social bookmarks - it cost me both in time and money but was an experiment for technical interest I had to try.

I got nowhere - I spammed many many SB sites with fake profiles and loaded them with bookmarks. No site of mine used for this test moved either up or down.

To the best of my knowledge therefore I would say that SB is dead as a dodo.

[mhansen]

To the best of my knowledge therefore I would say that SB is dead as a dodo

I don't want to disagree just for the face value of it... but if we look at links as money, social bookmarks are like pennies, nearly useless. BUT... when you fill up an old water jug with them, they can add up to a little something-somthing over long periods of time.

Drop some nickels, dimes, quarters and the occasional dollar bill into the jug and before long, its very worthy!

If social bm'ing is ALL you do, its going to take a very long time to really get anywhere, but as part of a complete link development and overall buzz strategy, they DO make an impact!

MH

[freejung]

Whether or not the links themselves confer value, consider this: those who use SB sites are probably more likely than the average user to be part of the "linkerati" - bloggers and such who have the ability to create their own links and might very well do so if they find something interesting.