Is Social Bookmarking Still Effective?

This week in the office, we’ve been debating whether social bookmarking is still important as an off page SEO technique.

We all know how important social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter are to building online presence, but are sites like StumbleUpon, Reddit, or Digg still useful?

Although they hold much less authority since the release of Google’s Penguin algorithm, social bookmarking sites are still a good resource to help build your back link profile. In terms of organic SEO, social bookmarking sites can often have a high page rank, allowing authority to flow through via do follow links. It can also help to prompt Google to index new pages on your site. However, this doesn’t mean that you should go crazy and get as many social bookmarking links as possible; back link profiles still need to be varied in order to be considered ‘healthy’ by Google.

In the same way that Facebook and Twitter increase interest in your site; social bookmarking can also help to increase traffic and user interactivity. Although this may not have a direct effect on your site’s rankings within Google, it may help to build a few more natural links for your profile.

The big debate here in our office was that no one really uses social bookmarking sites anymore. To an extent, this may be true; like many social sites, some become hugely popular one month and then are replaced by a new site the next. However, there are some social bookmarking sites, such as Pinterest, that have real staying power. If you’re investing a lot of time and effort into posting on Facebook and Twitter then you should look into why Pinterest is important to your business. Do some research into companies that are similar to yours or your clients and find out if they’re using social bookmarking sites. A social bookmarking site like Pinterest is usually a good option for businesses with a specific product to sell; fashion companies often ‘pin’ new products and then either Tweet or write a Facebook status about this ‘pin’. Integrating your social bookmarking accounts with Facebook & Twitter in this manner is often an effective way of increasing followers.

For an ethical SEO agency in a post-Penguin world, social bookmarking is nowhere near as effective for increasing rankings as it used to be, however, it shouldn’t be entirely written off as a useful tool. For any online business or website to work; you need traffic. Social bookmarking, though low value in terms of SEO, will help to improve your online presence and increase traffic; and, ultimately, who can say no to that?