Social bookmarking allows web users to search, share, organize, and store the bookmarks of different web pages. This can be done publicly or privately (in private groups), or a combination of the two. People who are allowed to view the bookmarks can view them using a variety of different functions to sort and tag them.
Most of the services that provide social bookmarking encourage you to organize bookmarks with informal tags. They allow bookmarks to be viewed with their associations to the tag, including information on the users that bookmarked those sites. Some services will even have RSS feeds for their lists, and you will be alerted when new bookmarks are shared, tagged, or saved.
The tagging and descriptions used in bookmarking is referred to as external meta data and can have huge benefits in SEO, because the information used in the tagging is not controlled by the site owners, but by the public. In essence, the information in external meta tags should be much more valuable than external inbound link anchor text or directory co citation. Especially if there are hundreds or thousands of users tagging these sites.
NoFollow is a non-standard HTML attribute value which is used to police the outbound link value of user generated content, especially blog commenting. NoFollow is used to communicate with search engines to tell them that a link should not be used to pass on link juice, or “PageRank”.
The idea is that it will help reduce people who spam links, making sure that search engines get better results when keywords are searched, and many social bookmarking sites havee implemented this strategy. However, there are social bookmarking sites that do not use nofollow in their HTML tags, and this is important for you to understand when you are developing your social SEO strategies.
Social Bookmarking Sites Which Don’t Use NoFollow
- Listible is a newer social bookmarking site, and it is very random. You can start a list about anything from TV theme songs to Firefox extensions. Users can then rate items and leave their comments.
- Furl, one of the services offered by LookSmart, allows you to copy web pages and then save, search, and share them. This social bookmarking site is great for everything from job searches to research papers to shopping lists. You can access Furl from any computer, and your favorites are always accessible.
- Yahoo My Web 2.0 Beta is a social search engine, meaning that people and the search engine technology work in harmony to create the optimum search experience. You can browse by keyword or search out interesting subjects. It offers you a way to bookmark and network simultaneously.
- Propeller is a hybrid of social bookmarking and social news sharing, with a voting system like Digg and hot stories, but it’s also owned by AOL, uses organic links in its stories, and also includes bookmark style tagging.
- Flickr gives social bookmarking a different spin – the site is all about photos. You can upload and tag your favorites, and then other users can bookmark them and share them with their friends. You can even leave comments as to why you like or do not like a particular image. Flickr lets its users place an HTML link in their photo descriptions – perfect for high rankings and relevant link juice.
- Digg.com can get a little crazy and confusing, since it is open for anyone to post sites and leave comments. The users of Digg.com are not shy about telling the world how they feel about different sites (especially if your story or ‘bookmark’ makes the homepage after receiving enough votes), and most of the posts are featured around technology items.
- Technorati Faves is a great place to bookmark sites on an authority social site without having the use of NoFollow cast a shadow on your links.
- Slashdot is the original when it comes to social bookmarking sites. Slashdot offers both personal bookmarks and summaries of stories which may or may not be approved to make it to the homepage. Users can submit links and stories and have other users leave comments. Submissions do have to be pre-approved, which is a downside for some users.
- Searchles is a social bookmarking oriented search engine with tagging, video upload, groups and voting. It’s also run by a search company, DumbFind, so they’ve made it extra search engine friendly.
Know of any more social bookmarking sites which don’t use NoFollow? Add some in the comments at the end of this post.
With your knowledge of the top social bookmarking sites that do not use nofollow, you can appropriately add these to your linking strategy. Remember, if a social bookmarking sites uses nofollow links, then your website will not garner the link juice benefits from these backlinks.
The Real Power of Social Bookmarks
However, don’t overlook the power of social bookmarking, especially for the major sites which use NoFollow, because their tags and external meta data can still be used to qualify and classify major sites. Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon should be your major social bookmarking sites to join because even if you don’t get the longterm link benefits of a No Follow, you’ll have the long term benefits of external meta data, votes and traffic (Delicious and StumbleUpon combined drove about 10,000 users to this story about using Images in Blog Posts over the past two days.)
Here’s a recap from a story I did in August about the direct influence of social bookmarking on search engines (read the whole thing).
How Search Engines Can Use Social Bookmarks
Monitoring social bookmarking services like Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon and Ma.gnolia can help search engines in multiple ways by:
- Indexing Sites Faster : Humans bookmark sites launched by their friends or colleagues before a search engine bot can find them.
- Deeper Indexing : Many pages bookmarked are deep into sites and sometimes not as easily linked to by others, found via bad or nonexistent site navigation or linked to from external pages.
- Defining Quality : If someone takes the time to bookmark a site, it usually has some quality to it.
- Measuring Quality : Essentially if more users bookmark a page, the more quality and relevance that site has. A site with multiple bookmarks across multiple bookmarking services by multiple users is much more of an authority than a site with only several bookmarks by the same user.
- External Meta Data : Users who bookmark sites tag them with keywords and descriptions which add an honest and unbiased definition which is created by the public and not the owner of the site.
- Co Citation : Social bookmarking sites tend to categorize sites and pages based upon the tags used by humans to describe the site; therefore search algortihms can classify these sites with their peers.
In addition, by indexing the social measurement variables such as commenting and votes at Digg, Reddit, Netscape and various niche oriented (all of those Pligg powered hubs), search engine algorithms can also benefit from social news sharing sites by:
- Number of Votes : Similar to the number of bookmarks, the more votes a page receives on Digg or Reddit, the more useful that information usually is. If the same page receives multiple votes across multiple social news voting sites, the higher quality the site.
- Categorization : Like Co Citation, categorization can help define the subject of a site, therefore better helping the engine address searcher intent.
- Commenting : The number of comments can be compared to the number of votes, the higher the comment to voting ratio, the more relevant the news story or site was to the user; therefore, more relevant to the searcher.
- Relevant Sites : Techmeme and Propeller (and hopefully soon Digg) suggest relevant pages and sites to the stories which make their ‘popular’ categorical pages via intra-linking or blog index monitoring. Engines can learn from these projects to help users find alternative or relevant selections in their search results.
To the best of my knowledge, no search engines are currently implementing all of these theories into their current algorithms, but we cannot overlook that Microsoft and Google are/were partners of Digg, Yahoo owns Del.icio.us and AOL runs Propeller (Netscape). These social services also offer API’s and are completely open to search spidering, which makes these variables mentioned above available to search engines for the taking.
Did any one mention MyBlogLog.com? They have search engine friendly links: http://www.mybloglog.com/
Excellent social/personal bookmark organizational site to check out: Xerpi. Organic, visual system of drag& drop menus, access to community public favorites allows you to quickly tailor your ‘web surfs’ to your ‘web-favs’. Also features some very helpful and efficient navigation tools that keep your mouse clicks to a minimum. Go to http://www.xerpi.com
I would like to know how much credit is given by the different engines to links with a no follow in there
thanks man, your list is very coooool..:)
I also wish if Stumbleupon use do-follow links.
I believe since this article was published, that Flickr has started using NOFOLLOW tags on their site. Oh well. :(
Plenty of bloggers are moving towards dofollow which is a good move. I’m not sold on delicious and stumble for every industry however. I use digg and propeller quite a lot to get pages indexed.
I m new to all this blog and search engine stuff. recently completed a diploma in web designing so i was trying my hands on blogs and was researching on this link love and link juice and this no follow stuff you people are talking about. To be very honest.. this blog really helped me in knowing a lot about how this no follow and link stuff works and it also guided me to the right places to find it . so who ever is behind this wonderful blog i wanna thank him a lot… nancy
We are the company developing brand new search enigne on top of public social bookmark collections. Now we are in invitation-only private beta stage, if you are interested in
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Take a look at http://www.entopica.com/, a new online system that allows you to easily access, categorize, share and store your bookmarks online.It is free to join and registration is both quick and easy. Discover a whole new world of social bookmarking.
Social bookmarking seems to be the new thing in marketing and SEO. Great site.
The DoFollow sites I really love are Google.com/Bookmarks, Mister-Wong.com, and Reddit.com – love the traffic. Also, keep in mind that as of a few weeks ago or so StumbleUpon is NOW a DoFollow site. So Stumble your site if you haven’t already!
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please add space-d.com to your list.. we are dofollow and pr3.
Bookmarks-sites.com site gestion de favoris en ligne.
http://bookmarks-sites.com/
Even this Review Bookmarking site is DoFollow site…
Hi Loren , I have done a little research and although many Pligg based Social Networking / Bookmarkers don’t use the rel – no follow attribute in their links ( as can be checked manually or by various tools ) the linked URLs seemed to be re directed by script , which means many spiders can’t follow them , this is not the same as the no follow tag on the hyperlink itself Some one who knows the pligg code and also how re direction effects links , may be able to shed some light — for instance Furl appears to be “do follow” , but have never seen INlinks appear for it Also thanks for the continued high quality articles
thanks.
i will use this method.
Thanks for the list. I’ve searching for social sites without noFollow. :)
yahoo…it’s cool bro.
Thanks for the list. I’ve searching for social sites without noFollow. :)
very fast to pagerank…
visit my blog….
It neat to see how some of these social bookmarking sites are holding up. May because of the rush to bookmark sites, some of the sites are having issues holding up. Thanks for the nice list … will dofollow on the links
Thanks for the great list and in depth explanation of these sites. I found it extremely helpful as I am new to SEO.
Here are 2 dofollow:
http://www.kapely.net
http://www.letsbookmark.net
Mixx is another good one!
Furl has doesn’t implement nofollow, but all the links are internal > redirect links… so it doesn’t help.
Thank for good social-bookmarking-sites ,it is help me for marketing for my site
The no-follow tag, from my experience is harmful to the websites own serps.
Nice article about bookmarking. I’m just getting into it, and this helps.
Here is another one that is dofollow. I use it all the time
http://www.recd.us
enjoy !!
This is great for us to be aware to use those SB List
Yeah i agreed this will be great news for us. Thanks keep it up.
Loren , you put a nofollow on your link’s from your own flickr account, why would you do that? are you building trust with google ? :0 rather than looking for a link?
Get 100 High PR backlinks and huge Traffic for $20 from Social Bookmarking Service, you can get high PR backlinks from http://www.bookmarking-service.com
Thanks for the nice list . I found That extremely helpful as site promotions
This is just the kind of list I was looking for. This is a very helpful article. Thanks!
hey that is nice article and of social bookmarking has long been effective.and realy this artical very helpfull for the Website optimizer and webmaster.
I am the webmaster of http://www.niwell.com which is into Shared & Dedicated Web Hosting . I am currently working on to promore our website on the web through SEO and is busy in searching for as much information as possible related to various SEO practices. I found this article of extreme importance. Thanks a lot.
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the post is very useful
Re-reading this article, I was always resonated with
“In essence, the information in external meta tags should be much more valuable than external inbound link anchor text or directory co citation.”
True power of social bookmark is , I believe
when it is harnessed beyond individual online storage for bookmarks. Vivid example might be a search.
The company that I belonged to develop “Social Search Engine” with human bookmark sites,
lexicon/index built by tags not parsed keywords,
ranked by social factors(like human bookmark activity), not link structure.
Please, visit us and enjoy new aspect of leveraging social bookmark assets with our public beta
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Very good collection of bookmarking sites.Thanks for sharing!!
Social bookmarking is a good and simple way to promote our sites,to get more backlinks.I have used them for a long time.
A very good post. No follow tags seemsis the trend. Wondering what will be the impact on link building strategy?
Good list of social bookmarking site list.
can you please add one more site of sb
which is http://www.spicybookmark.com
thanks.
great list
thanks
Hi you can check also http://www.tungaw.com it’s just new social bookmarks. Thanks!
my site will allow follow and i see in my google webmaster stats i even get hits from google for certian search terms
its a very bad idea that many blogs nowadays are turning into nofollow.but they need to remeber that they are where athey are just because of linking..
Thanks a lot for the useful social links.
very interesting post, actually I get mass traffic from stumbleupon to my sudoku website, and the traffic is organic which converts very well.
Many german blogs have removed the nofollow attribute.
Seems more and more sites are getting away from the no follow insanity. I personally have well over 100 sites and refuse to use no follow!
Hello,
you can also check this upcoming bookmarking site to add your bookmarks online social bookmarking
I think Furl uses no follow dude.
it will be interesting to see a next change of SE algorithms isolating dofollow hype
thanks for the list mate
humm nice list of sb sites.
thanks dude .. keep it up. :)
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Theres an extensive list of dofollow resources here:
http://seo-expert-marketing.blogspot.com/2008/06/do-follow-blog-list-of-lists-this-is.html
Thanks for this, very useful :)
Super helpful SEO blog.
Another dofollow site you should check out is http://shoutwire.com. All links are followed but non-news spammy stuff will be frowned upon!
It’s amazing how many do not realize or even know about nofollow sites and wonder why they are not getting the ‘exposure’ they desire. This is a great source of valuable information to be shared. Thank you for doing so.