Social Bookmarking

Introduction

Increasingly when you visit a web site, you will notice that there are lots of strange icons that take you to sites with strange names. These are social bookmarking sites and they allow you to add sites of interest and share them with other people. The idea being that sites with good or useful content are being flagged up, enhancing the user experience. Are they a useful for SEO or will they just become another way to collect spam?

The Origin of Social Bookmarking Sites

Although we are seeing a proliferation of social bookmarking sites, they actually date back quite a long time. In1996, a website called itList.com which allowed users to manage their bookmarks and share them among their friends. With the explosion in so called web 2.0 sites, where the users are largely responsible for generating content, the number of social bookmarking sites has expanded into many niche areas. From an SEO perspective, many bookmarking sites allow you organise and search bookmarks by tags rather than folders so the tags that you choose affect the visibility of your links.

Popular Social Bookmarking Sites

In the early days of the web one often included an ‘add link to bookmarks’ link on the page in the hope that users would add it their list of bookmarks on their browser. The idea of sharing bookmarks between people has been taken up by the  SEO community. But having established that is a good idea, which ones should you use? A survey in 2007 carried out by AddThis showed statistics of the popularity of various social bookmarking sites.

Social Bookmarketing Share in 2007

In 2008 another survey showed the following results,

Social Bookmark Popularity in 2008

These figures should be taken with a pinch of salt. It includes other data such as email and Facebook which are not social bookmarking sites.  The 2008 survey does not even add up to 100%. But in the absence of any other data,  we can broadly conclude, the most used social bookmarking sites are Digg,  StumbleUpon, Reddit, Delicious, Google Bookmarks and Technorati at the moment. As anecdotal evidence, I have also noticed a large number of sites that use Sphinn but that is probably because their logo is more obviously placed in posts.

Which Social Bookmarking Sites Should I Add?

It really depends on the area that your website is in. If it is a store that sell a boring run of the mill product that anyone can buy on a large number of websites, then it probably isn’t worth it. If you run a blog, then it might be worthwhile adding a few bookmarking icons based on the principle a link is a link. If you are in a niche where the content of your site is really original or you have some great link bait then it could provide a way to accelerate the disseminate your content to the masses. A good list of social bookmarks and what they provide can be found on Mashable.com.