SEO Step By Step Guide—38. Understanding Social Bookmarking

When we use the World Wide Web, we come across so many useful websites, interesting news, rare information, captivating video and so on. Normally we bookmark these sites locally in our computer or add them to our IE’s list of favorites to access them at a later stage without having to make a search. However, this list of favorite will be available only in our computers or laptops. If I need to access this list of favorites when I am travelling, I need to carry my laptop. This may not be possible always and not everyone owns a laptop. They may be having the list in there desktop computer which limits the usage of the list. To over come this limitation a new approach was introduced to deal with our bookmarks. We can now have all our bookmarks online and this enables us to access our list of favorites from any part of the world. We are no more computer bound or laptop bound.

As one step further, these bookmarks can also be shared with our friends. They will be able to keep track of the updates in our bookmarks. If your friends too share the same interests then they will be able to access your bookmarks and benefit from the useful links. This is the underlying principle of social bookmarking. Now the individual bookmarks that make in the social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Delicious, etc., are made available online through online searches. You can also share the useful information with others on the internet.

SEO tries to tap on the potential of social bookmarking to build links. The favorite links shared by you in the social bookmarking sites are indexed and also followed by the search engine bots. Each link is counted as a back link to your site as this matches the original principle of back links. Search engines presume that you are book marking a particular link because you found it useful; it is considered to be useful for others too. When you increase the number of social bookmarks from various sites, your back links also increase boosting your websites ranking.

When used moderately, you can benefit a great deal out of social bookmarking. When it is over done, this strategy too can get you into trouble and your website’s ranking can drop. You must find social bookmarking sites that do not add ‘no follow’ tag to your link. If no follow tag is added, your link will be alive but search engine bots will not follow this link to your website, which means that it will not count towards your total number of back links.

So do not submit your links in a random way to all social bookmarking sites. First, find out how many of these sites allow search engine bots to follow your link so that you will not waste your time in submitting the links in an indiscriminate way.

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