iamned.com

Why Social bookmarking is a waste of time

Social bookmarking is the practive of using bookmarking and aggregation type sites such as digg, reddit or stumbleupon to submit stories and ‘vote’ on stories you find useful. The more votes a stry has the higher is may rank and the more traffic it gets. Socail bookmarking is like traditional linking except there is a social element involving an online community.

Since 2004 social bookmarking has EXPLODED in popularity. Digg gets millions of pageviews a month and is rated as one of the most visited sites on the web. meanwhile webmasters and bloggers spend a great deal of effort getting votes and and trying to improve thier rankings on social networking sites in the hope of driving more traffic to thier sites.

Unfortunetely, social bookmarking is a waste of time because supply vastly exceeds demand. there are TOO MANY stories being submitted and simply not enough carbon based lifeforms to read them. To get an idea of how many stories are submitted visit the digg upcoming section http://digg.com/news/upcoming There are over 8000 stores 99.9% of which only have one digg. I can guarantee with great certainty that none of these stories are gonna make it to the front page, nor will they get any traffic.

So how does make it to the top of social bookmarking sites? Usually those with conections and a large readerbase. If your blog is very popular like DailyKos or Johnchow getting on the front page of a social bookmarking site is easy becuae you have a large readerbase to vote on your stories. if you don’t have a large reader base you simply won’t be able to garner enough votes to make a dent.
Also social bookmarking sites provide little if any SEO benefits. Having your link on some sub/sub/sub page with a [rel=no follow] attribute won’t improve your rankings. Being on the front page of a social bookmarking site yields the most benefits in terms of SEO but as i said before getting on the front page is exceedingly diffiucult for most webmasters.

So where does that leave us? Unless you get a lot of traffic and reader, I recommend ignoring the social bookmarking sites alltogether and focus on getting SOLID HARD links via old-school 90’s era link exchanges. Find sites that are related to yours and try to exchange links with them. It is much more effective to have a quality site giving you a permanent home page link than being burried on some social bookmarking site. Not only do you get SEO benefits but you also get some traffic as well.

As a word of caution don’t try to game social bookmarking sites via ‘digg clubs’ or other shenanigans. You may get your site banned and won’t be able to reap the later benefits of social bookmarking sites should your website become more popular and develop a bigger readerbase.