Some years ago, there was a craze among bloggers to promote their blog posts in social bookmarking sites. The hordes of visitors thronging the social bookmarks encouraged new entrepreneurs to launch bookmarking sites and they, in turn, strived hard to make it popular among bloggers and internet marketers.
Within a year or two, the number of working social bookmarking sites rose to more than 200. Then the birds and animals were let out by the Google. I am referring to the Penguins and the Pandas that announced the change in Google’s search engine algorithms. Consequently, the links dropped by the bloggers in social bookmarking were devalued and thus came to the end of social booking networks.
Of the then popular social sites, very few remain alive today though with a slightly different perspective and that includes reddit.com, dig.com, and Stumbleupon.com. Of the three, reddit is a much-respected site. There are some more social bookmarking sites but I suppose veteran bloggers don’t disturb them.
What is a social bookmarking site?
I am sure I should have raised this question at the top of this post but my enthusiasm made me assume that all of you are already aware of them.
We all use social bookmarking quite frequently either by using the browser bookmarking tool or use the keyboard shortcut ^D. (control+D) These favorites (bookmarks) of ours are stored only on our browsers to visit again.
Social Bookmarking is simply taking the existing bookmark function used in browsers, and making it shareable with other people, or “Social”.
Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage web pages as favorites on the Internet with the help of free social media sites.
- It’s a place online where you can share your blog posts with other users. This act of sharing is called social bookmarking.
- All the social bookmarking sites provide a button to vote beside each article/story shared by the members. If you vote other people’s sites and they vote your site.
- The number of votes received was indicated beside each bookmarked link. The more the votes your link gets, the more visitors your link gets.
- When you comment on other’s posts, then you will soon have a network of links pointing back to your site.
- Sometimes, your link is moved to the top of the featured links by the site owner and this sent a truckload of visitors to your site.
Why social bookmarking sites became popular?
1) They get a lot of traffic due to their utility value. Members often return to read the latest stories and share their own. Thus a member pays a number of repeat visits and this, in turn, increased the popularity of social bookmarks.
2) The advertisers reached out to social sites and their revenue hit the roof.
3) Though every social bookmarking site is different and the interface sometimes proved to be a challenge to the users, users thronged them because they got genuine targeted visitors to their links.
4) The social bookmarking are free and it takes a minute to register and bookmark your first link.
5) No limit was imposed on the number of links submitted.
6) A few newly launched social news sites used the feeds of these social bookmarks and that became another lucrative online business.
7) Most social networks are to be search engine friendly. When the linkbacks you get were valued by the search engines, naturally, your site’s Google Page Rank got a boost.
All these advantages were history for the Internet marketers. There is really no point in dropping links in social bookmarks as there is really no interaction taking place there. They have all become a link dumping yard.
However, as I said earlier, one can still use Reddit and result can be staggering but it is sad that not many bloggers have understood the working of Reddit and its 8000 plus subreddits.
The Digg is now a social news site and it is better to stay away from it.
My vote is for Stumble Upon as they have somehow persisted in spite of Google’s storms and is still being actively used by the bloggers.
