What are Bookmarking Sites and How To Use Bookmarking Sites

Online article writers and new internet marketers are soon exposed to the concept of bookmarking sites and encouraged to use them. Writer skeffling over in Infobarrel ask what bookmarking sites are all about.

“I still don’t get bookmarking sites. What is the definition and scope of one? Do FB and Twitter fall in that definition? What we are allowed to do, what we are not allowed to do. What is considered spam? I signed upfor Infopirate back in Oct to backlink and was told by them it was spam, and not unique, so I haven’t really done any since anywhere.

Are the days gone of sitting down for an hour and linking a number of your own articles? Which ones are worth using, the best for being stable not likely to fold after we spend time linking? Is it even worth doing or do you get hit and run non clicking traffic? Are the links valuable in any way? What about do follow-no follow?”

Lots of great questions worth exploring.

Brief History of Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to organize, store, manage and search for resources online. Many online bookmark management services have launched since 1996 and many have failed. Delicious, founded in 2003, popularized the terms “social bookmarking” and “tagging”. Tagging is a significant feature of social bookmarking systems, enabling users to organize their bookmarks in flexible ways.

In social bookmarking users tag and often publically share interesting or useful content they discover. This process involves making links and adding some information and context to the link.

Early attempts at developing social bookmarking sites failed for various reasons including:

• operating costs vs revenues inbalance
• failure to attract enough users
• cost of fighting spam

Two breeds of social bookmarking sites emerged – large sites used by the general public to bookmark and share interesting content and smaller sites used exclusively by writers and internet marketers to backlink their sites. A few sites kind of cross between the two types – or try too.

Big Widely Used Sites

While bookmarking sites seem to come and go and rise and fall in popularity (the users love the next big thing), current big sites include StumbleUpon and Reddit. Much time can be wasted surfing links and rating them on these sites for absolutely no personal benefit. These sites actively discourage self promotion which the users see as spam. Your links can be voted down and accounts can be banned for doing that looks like a profitable activity.

The good part of these sites is that a popular bookmark can hit the front page and go viral, leading to hundreds of thousands of views in a day. Generally the traffic is going to be adverse to clicking ads because they are just looking for a laugh or to be shocked or entertained, but you will still make some money and your content will get lots of exposure. Generally these visitors are not in the buying mode like a person might be when searching for information on a particular narrow topic.

Dedicated Bookmarking Sites

Some webmasters saw an opportunity and launched bookmarking sites that look and act somewhat like the big sites but do not have the same anti-self promotion bias. To attract users they offered revenue share (Adsense impressions etc) and referral bonuses (often more Adsense impressions). Obviously the target market is people who have Adsense accounts because they own websites or work on revenue share sites.

These bookmarking sites are used to create links to various webpages with some explaination and tags just like the big sites, but few people are looking around and sharing the content with other users. While a bookmark may rank in the search engines and get traffic that is not the main goal. Rather the user is looking for a backlink to their webpage. Everyone knows that they are self promoting.

Are Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn Social Bookmarking Sites?

No, not really. They are social networking sites where users share all kinds of information with friends, followers or connections. These social networking sites do allow for link sharing with a little write up about the link so they do share elements of the social bookmarking sites. Another benefit is that you can freely share your own links (as long as you don’t annoy your connections too much, but the shear mass of information shared will bury your links fairly fast. Google sees links on these social networking sites and gives weight to those links in ranking webpages.

Google Love from Bookmarking

Some bookmarking sites have been really successful at helping to funnel traffic to linked sites, but they do get slammed down too by Big G. Also while on one side the bookmarking sites are encouraging webmasters and writers to create links from the site, they can be overwhelmed by automated spammers.

As a result, bookmarking sites will change their rules and procedures. Examples:

Xomba.com (which also hosts revenue sharing articles) has gone from encouraging bookmarking of your own material to banning it to permitting it again in the span of a couple years. This was because of getting knocked down by Google, resulting in a whole redo of the site structure.

Infopirate.com was hit by Russian spammers and then Google. As the site got popular with Infobarrel writers bookmarking their content Infopirate and some of there members went after anything related to Infobarrel.com. They mass deleted Infobarrel bookmarks and banned members. This was straightened out eventually but the deleted bookmarks were not all restored. Admin stated it was fine to bookmark to Infobarrel but you must also bookmark a variety of other websites too.

SheToldMe.com owner James Colin got feed up with spammers in late 2011 and implemented a $12 a year fee to post to weed out bad users.

No Follow vs. Do Follow

Some sites have gone to no follow to discourage spam, while others remain do follow. The links from do follow sites are worth more because they flow PageRank but not much PageRank flows from a site that is packed with outbound links and few inbound links. This article explains the whole concept of No Follow vs Do Follow in more detail if you are unfamiliar with how PR works.

What Bookmarking Sites to Use

If you want your articles to be seen, then doing some social bookmarking is a good idea. You need backlinks and social bookmarking sites are a free way to get those backlinks. Getting your content shared on the big sites is great but do it carefully. Posting to Facebook and Twitter is completely cool.

Some of the sites also allow you to earn Adsense revenue, which is a nice bonus. Of these sites, currently I like:

• Best Reveiwer for it’s function of creating Tops Lists of links very quickly. It shares one Adsense block 100% of the time.
• Xomba because you can create a bookmark with 100 words min to back it up. 60% Adsense share.
• KarmaLynx because it is fast, though not a very fancy site. Shares Adsense.

There are number of other sites worth checking out. ClassicalGeek maintains an ever changing list of bookmarking sites Click through to see the plexo and she has a good article comparing backlinking to bookmarking.