If you’re looking for a tool to promote your website(s), the buck stops with social bookmarking. With the advent of Web 2.0 and its focus on the social aspect of the Internet, listing your pages on bookmarking sites is a surefire way to get visitors to your pages – they either get there by directly clicking on your link, or if your page is ranked highly enough, it turns up on a Google search depending on how trusted your site is.
Since it’s tedious and time consuming to manually add bookmarks to various bookmarking sites, most people turn to automated software that is able to do this for them. While there are many options available, some free and others at a cost, the thing to remember when choosing automated social bookmarking software is to make sure your site is not blacklisted as spam.
Automated software that creates a large number of profiles and continually posts all your pages to every social bookmarking site there is, runs the risk of getting your site(s) labeled as spam. You also abuse your Internet Service Provider by running this tool continuously and risk cancellation of your service. And finally, the bookmarking sites you post to will end up blocking you and putting an end to your posting days.
The key to selecting a good social bookmarking tool is to look for one that does not send out your bookmarks on a continuous basis, but which posts tags gradually and once every few days. You must be able to set the time frame for the posting. You must also look for software that is server based and does not run on your PC. It’s more complicated to install but the difficulty is worth it when you consider the savings on your resources.
The bookmarking tool you use must randomly select tags and bookmarking sites so that the posting process looks like it’s been done by human beings and not a machine. Some tools even offer to post from proxy servers thus reducing the possibility of your sites being blacklisted and blocked as spam.
Automated social bookmarking tools are useful only when used judiciously – after all, there’s no use for a bookmarking strategy or tool when your sites are all blocked out as spam.
This post was contributed by Heather Johnson, who writes on the subject of dial up Internet. She invites your feedback at heatherjohnson2323 at gmail dot com.
{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }
I agree with Heather – the value of these sites is declining, mostly due to nofollow, and the fact that there are just too many of them.
I never liked auto posting bookmarks. The software and scripts that do autopost are probably 50% responsible for the rapid increase in SB sites using nofollows.
Let me just say that using automated social bookmarking software is the worst thing you can do to your site besides posting all your own content to begin with.
Lets say you use social marker. Would it be natural to Google to find the same links, submitted in the same order on 20 different bookmarking profiles? NO.
The Google fall PR slapdown is coming for this kind of activity and it is not going to be pretty. The latest PR update was brutal as it was but the Q3 update is going to be burying bookmarking spammers.
Cool blog man, using thesis too. I like the way it’s no nonsense: Here’s some content, here’s my product, here’s how much it is.
I used an automated tool for a bit, there’s no way I’d do it manually, didn’t really get into it as it was kind of buggy and it wasn’t a big strategy for me anyway.
Admittedly, I don’t know much about this area. I have done some social bookmarking. I am very curious about how to automate this process. What are some of your recommendations for “quality” social bookmarking tools? I understand that some of these can be very detrimental. I would really like to know more about the quality ones.
Right now, I’m just submitting to Digg and StumbleUpon, mainly for traffic and quick inclusion in search engine indexes. Reddit has brought some traffic in the past, but I haven’t posted to it for a while. One service that is handy is socialmarker.com
Carl
Thank you Carl, you have revealed the dark side of automated system. These things are really important to know for new to social book marking people who are always in a hurry to get quick traffic but are not aware that this can actually harm them. One thing is very important to know that there are very few shortcuts in this internet world and some of them are very risky.
One should always use ethical methods for promoting the website, it might be slower but gradually with give you traffic and will make your website trusty in the eyes of search engine.
I have to admit that I have considered it but now I do it all manually. While I do get some good traffic, it is not good enough to make it worth my site getting banned. I tend to bookmark a lot of things on other relevant sites, try to keep the content along the same niche and just open up different accounts if I have to promote different niches. It is much more natural and I do not have to worry about Google or the SB sites shutting me down for spamming my own materials.
Just my two cents but great post. I have long advocated the all-organic methods. Like Agra said, it may take a little more time but while your competitors are trying to recover from the latest and greatest automation tool gone bad on google, our sites will still be rolling along well.
Another great service to ping your blogs posts is pingler.
I’ve found a fairly new product called onlywire and there’s a free option. It lets you setup accounts on social bookmarking sites and automates the process of posting your links including your own sites. I’ve used it numerous times and I think it helps me get some links from authority sites. I’ve even gotten some of those bookmarks indexed and ranked on Google, so I think it’s a good thing.
Jeff @ Spinning Reels´s last blog ..Rapala® RAPSX5IUL Ultra Light Spinning Reel
I don’t see anything wrong with automating the process of adding your bookmarks to the bookmarking sites like del.ico.us, Faves.com, Furl.com, Mixx.com, Spurl.net and the hundreds of other similar sites on the web. However, you must follow along with the spirit of these social bookmarking sites and add only quality content and not just blast a bunch of junk to them.
Rain@ Data Cleansing´s last blog ..Understanding Data Cleaning Techniques
I agree with mostly everyone that says these are not worth the risk. The best way to actually take advantage of the social sites is to put a widget at the top of your site that allows a visitor to easily bookmark it. Not only is that convenient for the visitor, but it will allow you to accumulate a lot of unique links over time, which is what Google prefers anyways.