Social Bookmark Links that are Worth Building and Pass PageRank
As of late, I have been seeing a tremendous amount of buzz and informational products built around the concept of using social bookmark sites such as Digg, Diigo, Delicious, etc. as an easy way to build quality back links to your content and help drive Search Engine Rankings. One thing that I have always found quite troubling about this concept is how so many of these articles and products mention Social Bookmarking sites that might have the potential to drive traffic, however they do absolutely nothing to build quality backlinks.
Such sites fall into two primary categories…
- Category One - Sites that utilize rel=”nofollow” to prevent any link value from being passed on to the target content. Some people feel there is still some value in these links and our own testing has shown they do have some effect, however, that effect is at very best minimal.
- Category Two - Sites that utilize domain redirection to send visitors off to your target content. This works as follows, you link to yoursite.com/article1 but in your posting the social website links to socialwebsite.com/redirect=yoursite.com/article1 or in some other similar matter. Such links are not seen by the search engines as a link to you but as internal links to the social website. They will not and can not affect your search rankings in any way.
So I started out this little project as simply having the goal to make a list of social bookmark sites that did two things:
- Did not use domain redirection
- Did not use rel=”nofollow”
Simple right? Well I thought so until I started with a list of almost 250 various social media websites and by the time I eliminated those that did not function properly, were to specialized into a given niche, did not allow access to the site with out registering (read that as did not let spiders into the content) and obeyed the direct linking rules I was down to just about 20 odd sites.
I then began to think about some other factors that were evident and a few I decided were important enough to create a basic ranking system on a 10 Star rating system. Here are the factors I considered and my reasoning behind them.
- Google PR on The Home Page - I decided to give each site 1 point if that site had a Google PR of a 4 or higher on the main page of the site. The real value of published PR numbers is very questionable but it does give us some indication of link value. PR4 simply seemed like a reasonable expectation for sites like these to achieve.
- Google PR on the Sub Pages - This is another area where I just had to pick a number and go with it. I simply checked the main sub pages of each site to see if any were at least a PR3. Reason being that it may give some indication of how well the site passes link value on through its internal links. This is important because even if you make page one you won’t be there for very long. If the site had at least one PR3 sub page it earned one additional point.
- Does the Site Use PermaLinks - By this I mean when you submit content is a specific page created on the site just for that content. This is one of the most critical factors in my opinion so if the site uses permalinks it got two points. There reason there is so much value to this is it will allow you to build additional off site links to your posted content and build even more link value.
- Does the Site refrain from using NoFollow or Redirection - If not, the site does not even get on the list; but to round out my scale to an even 10 star system each site gets one point for this critical component.
- Is the Alexa Ranking 10K or better - This list is not about driving traffic at all, only about link value and building back links with it. Yet if a site has high traffic volume it will continue to gain more and more of its own links and build power. Hence a site with a 10K or better Alexa rank was given one point due to the fact that link value on the site in theory should continue to rise.
- Does the Site Use Anchor Links - This is another very critical factor in link building and on some levels it matters a lot more then the raw value of the page that provides the link. Some services give you a link that begins with http://. Such links are no where as near as valuable as a link that is formated with anchor text under your control. So each site received or lost two points for this factor. This factor alone dropped Propeller from a 10 to an 8.
- Is the Domain over Two Years of Age - There are two primary factors at play on this one. First in theory an older site should have more “trust” to pass on then younger sites. Perhaps more important though is that an older site is less likely to pull the old switch-er-oo on you. Here is what I mean by that. Many social sites start out giving you great links to get a lot of submissions at first. Then one day switch to redirects or nofollow to horde link juice, an older site in theory should be less likely to do this. This is in no way perfect so only one point was given based on this factor.
- Are more then 10,000 pages from the site indexed in Google - This is another one where I just had to pick a number, but 10K seemed reasonable for these types of sites. I dropped down to the 1000th result to check for supplementals and left it good at that if they were still showing valid content. One point was awarded for meeting this goal.
With that I put together my list and started judging them, as you consider the results the following things should be understood and considered.
- The criteria was set before I determined how the sites would score. Once I set the rules, no exceptions were made for any site based on my personal feelings.
- Factors like indexed pages and PR change often. In the week I worked on gathering this data more than three of these sites moved up or down do to such changes. These results are based on how things are as of March 4th 2008, they could change tomorrow.
- No order of preference is given for sites that have matching scores. So this list is not saying that Metafilter is ranked higher then Digg or that IndianPad is higher then Mixx.
- It bares repeating that this has nothing to do with direct referral traffic. This rating system is based on the value of building back links with these services for SEO and nothing more.
- If your personal “Pet Social Site” is not listed it is not out of malice in any way. I found as many sites as I could that met the dofollow and no redirection criteria as swiftly as I could. If you know of a site that should be added to the list, please post a comment and we will try to add it.
- Some sites can be “forced” into compliance with nofollow in a way. Such as postings on Reddit have nofollow removed after so many votes, etc. Such sites were not included. The criteria of valid back links for any and all submissions was religiously enforced.
So here is the list of sites and how they scored in each category,
|
Site and Rating |
PR4+ Home | PR3+ Sub | Perma Links | No NoFollow | 10K+ Alexa | Anchor Links | DA 2+ | 10K+ GI |
| Metafilter 10 Stars |
Y-PR7 | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y |
| Digg 10 Stars |
Y-PR8 | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y |
| IndianPad 10 Stars |
Y-PR6 | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y |
| Mixx 10 Stars |
Y-PR6 | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y | Y |
| Searchles 9 Stars |
Y-PR6 | Y | Y | Y | N | Y | Y | Y |
| Bringr 9 Stars |
Y-PR5 | Y | Y | Y | N | Y | Y | Y |
| SearchAllInOne 9 Stars |
Y-PR6 | Y | Y | Y | N | Y | Y | Y |
| Propeller 8 Stars |
Y-PR7 | Y | Y | Y | Y | N | Y | Y |
| PlugIM 8 Stars |
N-PR3 | Y | Y | Y | N | Y | Y | Y |
| BlogMarks 7 Stars |
Y-PR4 | Y | N | Y | N | Y | Y | Y |
| Kinja 7 Stars |
Y-PR6 | Y | N | Y | N | Y | Y | Y |
| FeedMarker 7 Stars |
Y-PR6 | Y | N | Y | N | Y | Y | Y |
| Business-Planet 7 Stars |
N-PR3 | N | N | Y | N | Y | Y | Y |
| ContentPop 7 Stars |
Y-PR4 | Y | Y | Y | N | Y | N | N |
| I89 6 Stars |
N-PR0 | N | Y | Y | N | Y | N | Y |
| NewsWeight 6 Stars |
N-PR1 | N | Y | Y | N | Y | Y | N |
| MarkTD 5 Stars |
N-PR3 | N | Y | Y | N | N | Y | Y |
| JumpTags 5 Stars |
Y-PR4 | N | N | Y | N | Y | N | Y |
| Linkatopia 4 Stars |
Y-PR5 | N | N | Y | N | Y | N | N |
| SocialLogs 4 Stars |
N-PR3 | Y | Y | Y | N | N | N | N |
|
Site and Rating |
PR4+ Home | PR3+ Sub | Perma Links | No NoFollow | 10K+ Alexa | Anchor Links | DA 2+ | 10K+ GI |
How to get the most out of this data.
- First, you should understand that I am not claiming that my system is perfect but I do think it is a valid way to “classify” social sites. As you build content that you bookmark you may want to take on the approach of bookmarking one piece of content into something like 2 of the 10 star sites, 2 of the 9s, etc and rotate things often so you build links in a way that is quite random.
- Next, don’t bookmark under the same name or handle all the time. This is not suggesting that you have multiple IDs so you can go voting for yourself. No, it is simply so you don’t end up with all your submissions associated together in one single profile. A simple tool like RoboForm can help you with this.
- When you put content into a site that uses permalinks, take the extra step from time to time (think random) to create a link to that permalink. Lots of sources come to mind, a Squidoo Lenses, Blogger or WP Blogs, an Article in a Directory, a Press Release, etc. This builds the value of the link on that page and often you can get the submission itself to pop for a variety of terms in the SERPs.
- Do not expect to rely on sites like these as your sole source of link building. Think of these links like taking vitamins if you are an athlete. Consider your daily link building and viral link building to be like training and exercising etc. The vitamins (social links) help to put you over the top but they won’t make you one of the best alone.
I hope this list will continue to grow and become a valuable resource for people that want to build quality back links via social bookmarking websites. If you have suggestions for improving the list, sites you want us to consider adding or just comments or questions on this project, just leave a comment below.
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March 5th, 2008 at 4:17 pm
Hi Jack,
Thanks for your research. Very helpful. I’ve done sporadic work myself on this question but never had enough time to do it in a systematic way. I have had good results with Clipmarks and Mister-Wong (they seem to show up in backlinks quite often), but how they fare in your matrix I’m not sure.
March 5th, 2008 at 5:12 pm
I have one thing to say abou this post:
DUDE!!!
March 5th, 2008 at 5:55 pm
Helpful info, thanks!
March 5th, 2008 at 9:03 pm
This is tremendous information..! Thanks for all your efforts in pulling it together.
Some of those sites I’d never even heard of, but of the ones that I know and use this list pretty much reflects my own experience of their value in delivering referral traffic. I do realise this is about linking, but Digg and MarkTD have consistently delivered more referral traffic to me than any of the others I use with the exception of StumbleUpon. None of the others I use are even on the list..!
Thanks again for all your work!
Cheers,
Martin.
March 5th, 2008 at 9:55 pm
Thank you for this article. You have obviously put a lot of time and research into this, and I am sure there are a lot of people who appreciate it.
March 5th, 2008 at 9:59 pm
You have obviously put a lot of time and research into this. Thank you for sharing this with us.
March 6th, 2008 at 3:49 am
This a really helpfull info, I will try to do the same in spanish, we have less Social sites but spanish market can offer a lot of link joice :]
March 6th, 2008 at 6:54 am
Excellent resource! I just hope it doesn’t get too popular and abused as so many if these link building strategies have been so far.
Too bad it has been Sphinned. ;(
March 6th, 2008 at 12:00 pm
Nice list, but I doubt that feedmarker.com will actually help your rankings. Only spam what is on their website!
March 6th, 2008 at 12:32 pm
I just completed a social bookmarking proposal for a client and am glad that two sites I recommended, Digg and Propeller, were on your list. However, I did recommend other sites, for example sk*rt, because it fit the client’s audience better. Bottom line - one social bookmarking site won’t meet all your needs.
March 6th, 2008 at 7:51 pm
Great post. Do you mind if I link to this post in one of my upcoming articles? Very useful information that I think a lot of my readers could use.
March 7th, 2008 at 12:33 am
[…] made a list of social bookmark links that are worth building Push my Buttons! submit_url = […]
March 7th, 2008 at 11:28 am
…Social Bookmarking sites that might have the potential to drive traffic, however they do absolutely nothing to build quality backlinks.
Well, not so. You may not get the actual backlink from the site itself, but you can’t tell me if you hit front page Digg or Reddit, that the links from users of those sites would start to build, and voila! quality backlinks galore.
Great list of useful social sites though!
March 7th, 2008 at 12:55 pm
Great effort on your research and thoughtpiece. You provided great info and criteria on evaluating the social websites. Super start and keep up with the steady and super effort.
Dr J
March 7th, 2008 at 1:31 pm
Thanks to everyone for the great feed back and kind words. Now to respond to a few specific points.
Martin I would agree that those are great sources of traffic and both do have link value as well. Stumble is by far the highest volume of pure traffic unless a site makes popular on Digg.
Rafael I would love to see what you come up with.
Tomaz, abused? Naw my article won’t have that big an impact. These sites get thousands of submissions a week.
Anne, I agree 100% that one site can’t do it all. There are many great sites out there that are specific to industry verticles. None were included in this list though because it was meant as a generic group of sites for simple additional link building. The niche sites may be the best resource for many people.
Derek, link away man, link all you want.
Brain, first Digg was included and got 10 stars. Second Reddit is a great site but this criteria was about building links that did not depend on anyone else to do anything. Sure getting traction on Reddit is a good thing and sure it might bring you links. However I don’t agree that it is as easy as “quality backlinks galore” it just isn’t that guaranteed. Again this project is about the relative link value of the link on the actual site that you can exercise control over. This is one aspect of link building not the whole shooting match.
March 7th, 2008 at 2:50 pm
Great post, lots of things to think about! The list of sites is especially helpful. It’s hard to keep up with and at the same time narrow down which sites are going to be useful for what purposes. I have also tried doing this in the past, but have never had time to do a thorough review.
Thanks!
March 9th, 2008 at 2:01 pm
Jack, great post! Like many of the others, we have been dabbling into the social bookmarking sites as well. There is much to learn and you have eliminated much of the leg work with this post :>). One thing I have found through experience is that many of the social bookmarking sites are moderated pretty well. Be cautious as to how and what you decide to bookmark and on what sites. There are some sites that will not even have a category close to what you are trying to submit and some are kind of funny about always submitting your own content i.e your own blog posts ( i have the emails to prove it). Make sure that you read the TOS for these sites so they do not get fed up with spammy submissions and ultimately change what we all love about them rel=”nofollow”!!! Again thanks for the info…
Annie
March 10th, 2008 at 9:20 am
Annie,
I agree with everything you said. This is why I stated things in the article such as, having multiple ids and not voting under your common name. The smart thing to do is make sure to submit some outside stories under any name you use rather then just having a pattern of submitting content from one location.
It takes more time to do things this way but it works better in many ways. Also when ever you submit or vote go vote for about 15-20 other submitted news at random. If you do this there is virtually no way for anyone to pattern or track that you are self submitting and besides I think the rules against that are just stupid anyway. I understand that these sites get upset if you start doing sock puppeting and falsely push stories to popular but if all you are doing is dropping a story in to let the collective vote it up or down, who the hell cares who submits the story.
March 10th, 2008 at 10:12 am
Touche’. Well Said
March 10th, 2008 at 4:20 pm
Great post here, thanks for the info!
March 10th, 2008 at 4:20 pm
Thanks for the great resources..^^..I will have this bookmarked..^^
March 10th, 2008 at 4:44 pm
WOW, what a great list!!
Thank you very much.
March 16th, 2008 at 4:11 pm
Socialmarker.com marked PlugIM like no DoFollow site, but in this rating it “no NoFollow”. Who is right?
March 21st, 2008 at 6:22 am
Social marker and social poster have mistakes (!)
Plugim doesn’t have ‘no follow’
March 22nd, 2008 at 7:44 pm
I have to admit social bookmarking has had my a little confused!! This really helped to clear things up for me, thank you.
March 24th, 2008 at 8:40 am
@Social Shopping,
You are correct PlugIM does NOT no follow links. Ryan Knowles (founder of PlugIM) built it to serve marketers from the beginning. We are working on one of our own that will be really cool and will really server the Internet Marketer, stay tuned and opt into our Blog Notification to be sure you find out about this site when we launch it, which will be very, very, soon.
Jack
March 24th, 2008 at 9:11 am
Just a heads-up, it looks like Linkatopia has gotten fed up with spammers and turned off new membership (unless you’ve been offered an invite from an existing member). Bummer.
March 27th, 2008 at 2:16 am
It’s worth pointing out that many of the sites listed view this type of activity as spam and aggressively monitor for it. For example, on metafilter, you’ll lose your registration fee and have your account banned if you’re affiliated with a link in a post. They catch offenders fairly easily because they stick out like a sore thumb in the community. It’s best to use your brain and not try to exploit community sites in this way. It’s bad for the internet and generally unethical. You’ll accumulate a net negative of goodwill from the internet’s population in the long run.
March 27th, 2008 at 9:46 am
@Leibniz,
You are making three totally separate points so let me address them as such.
1. Some of these sites do not want you submitting your own content. - Well if you use common sense you don’t submit under you own name on such sites, further you submit at least 5-10 pieces of content from other sources for every one of your own.
2. People that do submit self promotional material stick out like a sore thumb. - Sure they do if they are stupid or if their content is crap. What you don’t seem to realize is of course you think they all stick out but the very nature of NOT STICKING out is you don’t notice those people. In other words you don’t notice people like me.
3. It is wrong to submit your own content. - I find this to be the biggest load of BS ever sold on the Internet, a bigger lie then viagra spam in your email box. Why is it so terrible that I may submit my content or a clients content? First because of Digg’s stance on this many of the other sites welcome it and used that fact to spring board their success, MarkTD and PlugIM spring to mind as does Mixx. Second if my content is good content who cares who submits it. Please don’t lump in pure spammers with people that creatively submit good quality content and then allow the system to vote it up or down as intended.
This mentality is also why were are launching http://www.hatedorloved.com [currently in beta].
Jack Spirko
March 28th, 2008 at 6:13 pm
Writing articles may be an easy way to get more visitors to your sites and blogs. And if you submit your articles to social bookmarking sites as well you can use this indirect advertising to get more exposure. Thanks for the tips here on writing articles they are very useful I’ve added your blog to mailboxmoney Please visit and leave a comment with your link
March 31st, 2008 at 11:43 am
Just what I have been wanting! Something to take the guess work out of social bookmarking. There are so many out there I was getting confused on which ones I should be working on.
April 4th, 2008 at 1:07 pm
Excellent, Excellent, Excellent post! Thank you for doing all of the research on this! I am so glad I saw this post as I am studying these social bookmarking sites. It saves me a lot of time in Social bookmarking. I am bookmarking this post for sure!
Do you have a followup post on what kinds of results you have experienced?
April 8th, 2008 at 10:44 am
Thank you for this terrific post! I had never even heard of most the sites on this list, and I’m eager to check them all out.
With that said, it is worth noting that according to MarketersRelief.com, Jeff Waltz of Google recently issued a warning to anyone currently using social media for the purpose of link-building. The article quoted Waltz as stating “Webmasters who rely heavily on bookmarking their own sites to gain traffic will likely see a drop in pagerank before the end of 2008.”
Of course, in typical G fashion, they say that these changes will not affect the average internet user or the person that uses social media responsibly (as though it’s some highly-intoxicating, highly-addictive form of adult beverage). From past experience, we can assume this to be partially accurate at best. Once G has implemented these changes, social media will effectively have been transformed into a battleground where scandalous saboteurs spam the news-sharing sites with links to their competitors’ sites, getting them removed from the index, or at best eliciting a less-severe penalty such as a drop in PR or a sharp drop in the serps.
History also indicates that G will pretend these future problems do not exist, refusing to acknowledge the problem they created and looking the other way as the internet descends into a fiery pit of anarchy and chaos as the reverse spam wars take hold of the galaxy.
April 8th, 2008 at 11:04 am
@Pamela,
Thank you for the comments. On the drop in PR I don’t think Google means to punish sites for being in Digg, Mixx, etc. I do think if all your links are only from those sources some of your PR and SERPs may be at risk.
Still no one should only be using these sites for link building they are but a single component. Just like blog comments, on dofollow blogs they can boost rank and PR but only if you have links from other sources as well.
April 26th, 2008 at 2:01 pm
linktopia doesn’t have dofollow links no more
From their “sign up” page:
Search Engine Optimization? Go Somewhere Else!
If you’re here to boost your search engine rankings, you may not realize it but you’re a link spammer! We’ve added rel=”nofollow” to all new links so spamming Linkatopia with your links will NOT help your rankings.
April 28th, 2008 at 11:38 am
Not all of the sites on the list not using nofollow, at least these sites :
http://www.jumptags.com/
thttp://www.linkatopia.com/
they’re both using.
Thanks for the list though, great effort.
May 2nd, 2008 at 8:51 am
@bragn,
Perhaps you should read this post,
http://www.businessindallas.com/social-media/what-i-have-learned-about-social-media-from-mixx
Don’t be shocked as Linkatopia declines in popularity and sites like Mixx grow and thrive. I honestly think that nofollowing, redirection, etc is a great way to ruin a social website. Sure people want valid links, that does not make what they submit spam. Links have value and you know what when users submit their content to your site they contribute value to it, getting something back is not to much to ask.
@Larry,
Both of those sites added AFTER I put this list together, this is why I said in my post.
“These results are based on how things are as of March 4th 2008, they could change tomorrow.”
Indeed they have.
@all
Again I must say if you want lots of content and you are building a social site no one will help you as much as the SEO community. When we submit content simply let it be judged for what it is, judge the content, not the intent. This online hate crime legislation is simply pointless and stupid, IMHO.
May 3rd, 2008 at 3:04 pm
@pitumbo
We’ve enabled new signups again at Linkatopia. We have a new form that hopefully discourages people from creating 10 different accounts in 10 minutes.
@Larry and Jack
If you look closer, you’ll find that only NEW MEMBERS HAVE NOFOLLOW on their links. My account doesn’t and none of the “approved” members do. New accounts have them by default, then we look at their public links after a month and approve accounts that aren’t spam. NOTE that you can save whatever links you want if you make them *private* because then they’re encrypted and we can’t look at them anyway!
@all
Here’s what we DON’T WANT at Linkatopia:
1) People from India, Philippines, and elsewhere creating hundreds of accounts with the same spam links. We’ve found pages where people are charging money to “submit your links to 50 social bookmarking sites for only…” and 9 times out of 10 they were located in one of those two regions.
2) People who create an account and put 100 links to the same site (theirs) and never use Linkatopia again for anything else.
3) People (99.9% of the time spammers) who use OnlyWire.com or similar services to simultaneously send their spam links to as many different bookmarking sites as possible. For this reason we’ve blocked OnlyWire and other such sites. I cannot think of a legitimate reason why a person would have an account on 15 different social bookmarking sites other than to spam them.
On our site, we even RECOMMEND promoting your own pages by making your own links the first ones you bookmark. We recommend using the tag “About me” so other members can quickly see which links are yours! We’re just tired of people trying to take advantage of the system. Because of this, we had to disable new signups while we created a whole suite of tools to analyze the incoming user data and filter out those who are up to no good.