Social Bookmarking: Working, Benefits, and Example
When it comes to link building, there are a ton of techniques that can help you acquire links.
Some of these techniques are hard to do but produce good links, but some are easy to do but produce trash links.
One of the strategies we are discussing in this post is social bookmarking.
Toward the end of this post, you will understand whether it is a trash technique or a good technique.
Table of Contents
Too Long; Didn’t Read
Social bookmarking is a link-building technique that helps you build more backlinks. It involves submitting your sites to the bookmarking sites. It was a great technique in the past but doesn’t work nowadays. Also, Google ignores these links.
What is Social Bookmarking?
Social Bookmarking (SBM) is a link-building technique that lets you “bookmark” sites on bookmarking sites.
Let’s understand this concept in detail.
You must already be aware of what bookmarking means.
For example, if you found this page helpful and want to visit it later, then you can bookmark it in your browser. In the future, you can visit this URL just by going into the bookmarks.
These bookmarks are private to you and no one can see them.
Similarly in social bookmarking, you create bookmarks on social media sites and you visit these URLs from anywhere.
In the context of SEO, bookmarking is used for building backlinking purposes. Basically, whenever you create a bookmark in one of these social sites, it becomes a backlink for your site.
When you create loads of these links, it helps with SEO and rankings. The majority of the links created are no-follow, which means, Google doesn’t follow these links.
Recommended: What is the difference between nofollow and sponsored links
What is the Purpose of Bookmarking a Site?
The purpose of Social Bookmarking is to increase backlinks and speed up the indexing process.
Social bookmarking helps search engines find new content on the web and it can help speed up the crawling and indexing process.
It can also signal that this content is authoritative and it can help increase the authority of the website and the author.
The reason why these backlinks are popular among some SEOs is that they are easy to make and help with the ranking in SERPs.
Other backlinks like HARO, Email outreach, and Digital PR are comparatively harder to obtain. On the other hand, anyone can make Social bookmarking links.
It’s because HARO, email outreach, and others come under earned links while social bookmarking comes under self-created links. And self-created links have generally less value. And most of them are no-follow.
Recommended Reading: Are Backlinks Important for SEO?
How does Social Bookmarking Work?
To create backlinks through Bookmarking, you need to register to these sites and add the details like URL, category, Title, and Description.
The working of social bookmarking is simple.
First, you register yourself on a bookmarking site. Second, to submit the story or page, you need the Title, Description, URL (of the page), Category, and Tags.
After adding these, a bookmark is created and it becomes a backlink for your page.
Example of a Social Bookmark
Suppose you are a company that sells fences for homes. To make a social bookmarking link for it, you would need to follow these steps.
- The first step will begin by finding social bookmarking sites. You can find these by searching “social bookmarking sites”.
- Once you found a site, then you would need to register on it to add your site. For registering you would need your email, password, and username. Some websites have a captcha but some don’t.
- This step is not everywhere but some sites ask to verify your account.
- After the verification, there must be an option to submit a post or story. Click on it.
- You would need to fill them some fields. These fields will be Title, Description, URL, Category, and tags.
- The title includes your page title which has the main keyword. For example, in the image below, “Elevate Your Home’s Security and Style with Residential Fence Company in Miami, FL” is the title.
- Next comes the description. The length of the description depends on you. It’s like writing a meta description for your own blog, except you can add some more keywords here.
- URL is the next field. Social bookmarking is usually done for individual pages and not the whole site. So the specific URL will be added.
- Next, choose a category from the dropdown (if provided) or write your own. For example, in the image below, “Business” is the category.
- The last thing is Tag. You can add any relevant keyword related to the page or add your main keyword here. In the picture below, “residential fence company Miami fl” is the keyword.
- This is it. Now you can submit your bookmark. It now becomes a backlink for your site.
Here is how it will look once submitted.
Note: All bookmarking websites have almost the same steps with some having fewer or more steps.
P.S. Marketing Agencies that make social bookmarking links on a huge scale make separate email ids for link-building purposes. Mainly because of verification and keeping everything arranged.
What are the Benefits of Social Bookmarking?
The benefits of Social Bookmarking include an increase in backlinks, free promotion, faster indexing, and an increase in traffic.
Let’s discuss these in a little detail:
- Backlinks: Building SBM links is fairly easy. You can create a huge amount of backlinks without much effort. Most of these links are nofollow.
- Free promotion: It’s basically a free promotion because most social bookmarking sites don’t charge for making links. They also broaden your reach with new audiences.
- Indexing: sharing your content on these sites can potentially help in making the indexing process faster.
- Helps in Traffic: On popular sites, there is a ton of traffic and if they found your content relevant, they might click through your website. This helps increase your traffic and authority.
Is Social Bookmarking Good for SEO?
Backlinks like Social Bookmarking (SBM) don’t work today. Also, they aren’t good for SEO because it is an old strategy for making links. Search engines like Google ignore these links.
This might not be the answer you would expect after reading till here.
Links like profile creation, classifieds, directories, article submission, and more don’t work now because they are spammy and violate Google Search Essentials guidelines.
In fact, I did a study of digital marketing agencies in India and found most of the agencies made these kinds of spammy links.
Definitely check it out: Agency Study About SEO and Web Development Costs
Now let’s know what the SEO community says about these links.
This digital marketer asked about links like these and here are the replies:
Here is what Dr. Marie Haynes said:
And if we talk about Google’s opinion, here is what John Mueller says, “I don’t think those pages would have any effect on your ranking because probably we’re also ignoring those social bookmark sites, the links from there.
That’s a really, really old SEO strategy and we have a lot of practice in recognizing those kind of links and just ignoring them.”
Watch the video here:
Recommended Reading: What is Profile Creation?
Final Words
Just as certain things are not relevant these days, the same goes with Social bookmarking. While it was a good technique for backlink creation back in the day, it doesn’t help much now.
Google considers these techniques to be useless and ignores them. They are spammy because everyone can make them. They don’t provide any real value to either users or search engines. Making a lot of these links can lead to SEO Spam.
Recommended reading: What is SEO Spam?
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