Loading ...
« Does Eben Pagan Work in His Underwear? | Main | Squidoo Opt-In Forms are Back »
Is Your Bookmarking Campaign Helping You or Hurting You?
By Todd | December 15, 2008
If social bookmarking is so great for traffic and seo why do so many people fail to see results from their efforts? Perhaps it’s because they’re simply not spreading enough love around.
Remember, social bookmarking is about sharing and if all you’re doing is sharing your own content pages then you might just be doing more harm than good. With social bookmarking there are two things that can happen when you only bookmark your own content
- Social Community Rejection
- Google Filtering
Social Community Rejection
With Digg style social sharing sites it’s crucial that you Digg and submit other peoples content too or you’re likely to feel the wrath of the community. Digg style sites are sites where the content being submitted is subjected to community voting or ranking systems and there’s nothing members of these communities hate more than people trying to manipulate the system or spam them.
If all you’re doing is submitting your own content then you will appear as a spammer. If all of the content for your website has only the same 3 accounts voting for every page you’ll likely be discovered as a submission spammer. If your submissions and voting patters do not look natural then you’re going to eventually get busted.
When this happens it’s very likely you will find not only your account being suspended, but worse, the url for your website being banned from their submission process. When your url is banned there’s no way around it, you can’t simply create a new Digg account because NO accounts will be allowed to submit or vote for your content and the ban can be permanent. Having your url banned from the social sharing sites can be pretty detrimental to your future link building efforts to say the least.
Google Filtering (black listing)
The second issue applies to both Digg style sites as well as traditional bookmarking sites like del.icio.us and furl. Will these traditional bookmarking sites don’t really care about what you bookmark, because they’re not voting based sites, it’s still important to bookmark other content as well because Google does care.
We often bookmark is for seo purposes. It’s great for helping the search engines find and index you content quickly as well as for back links (especially from bookmark sites that don;t use the ‘nofollow’). The problem is that google has become very sophisticated in determining when something looks funny. They’re constantly creating algorithms to find places where there’s unnatural looking back link structures because they attribute this to a form of search engine manipulation or spam.
If you submit nothing but links to your own blog at a dozen different social bookmarking sites Google is going to pick up on this and treat it like a search engine spam campaign because it’s clearly not a natural pattern for legitimate bookmarking. In the beginning with newer sites you may not notice a problem and your bookmarking may actually be helping you. But if you all of a sudden you find your efforts are no longer working then there’s a good chance you’ve finally built enough suspicious links back to your site with bookmarking to trigger the Google filters. When this happens Google may black list your social bookmarking url and basically ignore it from that point forward. You an continue to submit to this url, but google is no longer paying any attention.
The Solution
The solution to both of these problems is very simple. Bookmark OTHER peoples stuff! Your bookmarking has to look at least somewhat natural or you’re going to get busted and a lot of effort will go down the drain.
It’s not hard. You surf all day long to sites you like and it only takes a minute to bookmark a site and move on. Most blogs have the submission buttons at the bottom the post, and with tools like www.onlywire.com and www.socialmarker.com it’s very fast and easy to submit to many bookmarking sites in just a couple clicks. Doing so will make your activity look natural and ensure you get the full benefit from your efforts.
By simply being a decent community member at these sites all will be good and you’ll find your bookmarking campaign performing for you the way it should.
Topics: Social Bookmarking, Social Marketing, link building |
Good stuff Todd!
I think many miss the point with social bookmarking. Constantly submitting your own stuff will not help you at all…like you said. Maybe only in the beginning.
But being active and bookmarking others….and WRITING GOOD CONTENT will help you get bookmarked too.
I don’t really have any “bookmarking” strategy, I just bookmark what I like….and if I am really proud of an article of my own I’ll submit it…I don’t do so very often though.
@Normal Joe -
hey thanks joe!
I completely agree with you. Usually the only time I submit my own stuff is when I really want to control the headline and description for the submission. If it’s a key submission for a campaign then I’ll do it.
t
Great post.
I think a lot of people think they only have time to bookmark or submit their own stuff but they’re missing out big time. I actually get a fair amount of traffic from people clicking through my Digg comments to my site because I left a useful comment on Digg for someone else’s blog post.
Of course the comment is intended to intrigue them to click to me :).
@rob -
Hey Rob thanks for the reply. And you know the real shame is that you can get even more benefit by bookmarking (and pinging) other sites that are linking TO you. This way you get the benefit of spreading the love while at the same time giving the links to your site a boost.
People really don’t get this so perhaps it will be a new blog posts in the next few days.
cheers,
todd
Hey Todd,
Is socialmaker still working for you or has it gone the way of being seen as SPAM, as I read the other day?
James Mangosteen Dean’s last blog post..Mangosteen Juice Helping With Thalassemia, Testimonial # 1
Hey James,
Socialmarker.com still works and will always work and here’s why …
All socialmarker does is help you navigate to each of the different bookmarking sites and quickly enter in your bookmark info. It’s simply a productivity tool. What it does is no different than if you went to each site manually and entered in the bookmark info. In fact from google’s perspective it has no way to know if you used socialmarker or not.
One caveat is that you would be wise to not use the exact same comments for every bookmark site and don’t always bookmark every post to every bookmark site. Skip some book mark sites this time and then hit them next time. Just mix it up a bit and you;ll have no problems.
Just remember to bookmark other peoples stuff as well and it will all be as natural as apple pie
todd
Great post Todd,
Social bookmarking, and all the automation tools on it, is pretty much normal these days in trying to grey hat the search engines.
Many just use multiple user names.
However, your right, the entire URL will get blacklisted by Google, so it wouldn’t matter who bookmarked it.
I’ve had that happen to me….. Who hasn’t.
Mark Dulisse
Mark’s last blog post..The Site Rush Bonus & Review
Hey Mark, thanks!
Yeah, it’s happened to me before too. Before I began bookmarking other peoples content.
It’s perfectly OK to bookmark 30 sites a day as long as they’re not all yours. In fact this is what the social bookmarking sites want and google has no problem with it. Isn’t activity what all sites want. The only time it’s ever a problem for google or the social sites themselves is when it’s clearly not natural looking and simply a grey hat ploy.
cheers,
todd