What am I not understanding about social bookmarking? 3 questions

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turdface

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Hi,

I'm a noob to this forum but not to internet marketing. However one thing I've never fully understood (or ever made use of) is social bookmarking. I'm hoping someone here can help explain this to me as it is related to getting a competitive advantage when it comes to SERPs.

Ok I know what social bookmarking is: you post links to your site at places like digg and you get a) backlinks and b) possibly more traffic. Awesome.

Here's what I'm wondering about:

I see posts that are like 400 SOCIAL BOOKMARKING SITES! Or like HUGE 1,000 SOCIAL BOOKMARKING SITES!!!

Ok, so you have a big list of sites. Now what?

1) I seriously doubt that there are people with legit social bookmarking accounts who sit around all day going "Gee, I wonder what cool new links were posted on [insert social bookmarking site] today!" So I can imagine any increase in traffic is minimal at best.

2) People get all these lists of social bookmarking sites and EVERY SINGLE TIME, without exception, the next question in the thread is "what software do I use to automate this?" Throughout all of these, I've seen a few mentioned (such as BMD), but EVERY SINGLE PERSON says it sucks, it can't break CAPTCHAs, the proxies are banned, or only a very small percentage of the links actually go through. So that makes me wonder, what is the purpose of these giant lists of bookmarking sites if you have to do them all manually? That would take FOREVER, for something that probably won't even get indexed and if so will only pass a tiny bit of link juice onto your site. It doesn't seem like a time-efficient strategy to bother manually creating social bookmarking sites.

3) Forum spam and comment spam are both at all time highs. In fact, Google will soon be ignoring forum spam (there's an article posted about it somewhere... basically Goog knows that forum spam is used by internet marketers and pretty soon it's not going to count when factoring your SERPs and may possibly result in a penalty) and same thing with comment spam. "OH WOW YOUR ARTICLE WAS SO INTERESTING PLEASE VISIT MY SITE FOR [insert link]." Surely Google must know that a large percentage of social bookmark sites are just BS spam from IMers, so how viable of a strategy is it, really?

It just seems to me like you'd sit around all day manually creating accounts and submitting links to your website (since all of the tools that claim to do it automatically don't work) and then maybe a small percentage of those actually get indexed and give you a little boost in the SERPs. And how many HOURS did you spend doing that?

What am I missing here?

Thanks guys.
 
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There are a lot of good link building guides on this forum, but for me I use:
-article networks (paid)
-social bookmarking with a program called Bookmark Wiz (automated for the most part)
-some web 2.0 links (senuke)
-forum profiles
-miscellaneous stuff from time to time to mix it up with a few domains of mine

Indexing hasn't been a problem for me except for forum profiles. I'm using some WP plugin I found on here that posts the links to web 2.0 to help them index in Google.

social bookmarking has never been about traffic for me. It is about getting a high pr link in some cases if you can get a tag page on somewhere like propeller. It's mostly just about getting links too.

As far as your last statement "It just seems to me like you'd sit around all day manually creating accounts and submitting links". Until you have the coin to automate/outsource backlinking then you'll be doing some leg work to get there.
 
Google's whole indexing strategy is based on links. "Whoever has the most links must be the most popular site." It's definately caused a ridiculous amount of backlinks to be built. What are the odds that a local auto repair shop in Birmingham, Alabama is going to naturally have 10,000 backlinks? LOL. But it's the game Google set up, there are only so many backlinks they can discount before their indexing model becomes useless. Without it the search engines would have to go back to indexing sites based on just onpage content. That isn't going to happen, the reason Google took over the field was because their idea actually did give a better indication of which sites people are looking for.

No matter how many marketers are building backlinks on the Social Bookmarking sites, there are real people using those sites too. They might not be the most powerful backlinks you can get but they are the most basic. There's no way Google can just discount those links without ignoring the real links that interested users are also making.

What looks like is happening with Google isn't so much that any particular backlink types are becoming useless. It looks like they're just trying to make better evaluations about which ones seem the most legit. That's not an easy task to achieve.

Rather than just giving up on any particular type of links, it's a better idea to just try to get a more natural appearance to their growth and a little more effort on their quality. Social Networking Sites and Social Bookmarking Sites are still the best places to start doing large scale backlinking. They're still the most likely place that a real site will get truly organic links from real people. Because of that they're the first places that Google would expect to start finding them.
 
Longover said:
Until you have the coin to automate/outsource backlinking then you'll be doing some leg work to get there.
Click to expand...

I've paid people to do this, mostly in India. In the past, they got me some links on reasonable sites with PR. However, the last couple of guys (including a company who did a good job first time around) have just created links on frankly rubbish sites with no PR.

I'm stuck really for what to do, but be warned that I think there has been a big increase in folks selling rubbish, and that a lot of stuff like directories, forum / comment spam etc. just doesn't seem to work any more :(
 
iv been using bmd with some success one of my bookmarks was on diggs and propellers front page for 1 week and in that week my uv's went through the roof i went from 300 uv's a day to over 1,000 just wish i could replicate that everyday :0(
 
turdface said:
Hi,



3) Forum spam and comment spam are both at all time highs. In fact, Google will soon be ignoring forum spam (there's an article posted about it somewhere... basically Goog knows that forum spam is used by internet marketers and pretty soon it's not going to count when factoring your SERPs and may possibly result in a penalty) and same thing with comment spam. "OH WOW YOUR ARTICLE WAS SO INTERESTING PLEASE VISIT MY SITE FOR [insert link]." Surely Google must know that a large percentage of social bookmark sites are just BS spam from IMers, so how viable of a strategy is it, really?
Click to expand...

Google cannot ignore forum links and blog comments. Why?? Because that is the way the web is built: Dynamic content! On the other hand, placing a link into a forum profile or posting a spammy comment on a blog without giving any value to the site owner is completely different. So that kind of links should be ignored. SPAM LINKS without real value! So do not freak out!

And about your main question, IMO social bookmarking is not useful if you are planning to spam useless information.
 
turdface said:
Hi,

I'm a noob to this forum but not to internet marketing. However one thing I've never fully understood (or ever made use of) is social bookmarking. I'm hoping someone here can help explain this to me as it is related to getting a competitive advantage when it comes to SERPs.

Ok I know what social bookmarking is: you post links to your site at places like digg and you get a) backlinks and b) possibly more traffic. Awesome.

Here's what I'm wondering about:

I see posts that are like 400 SOCIAL BOOKMARKING SITES! Or like HUGE 1,000 SOCIAL BOOKMARKING SITES!!!

Ok, so you have a big list of sites. Now what?

1) I seriously doubt that there are people with legit social bookmarking accounts who sit around all day going "Gee, I wonder what cool new links were posted on [insert social bookmarking site] today!" So I can imagine any increase in traffic is minimal at best.

2) People get all these lists of social bookmarking sites and EVERY SINGLE TIME, without exception, the next question in the thread is "what software do I use to automate this?" Throughout all of these, I've seen a few mentioned (such as BMD), but EVERY SINGLE PERSON says it sucks, it can't break CAPTCHAs, the proxies are banned, or only a very small percentage of the links actually go through. So that makes me wonder, what is the purpose of these giant lists of bookmarking sites if you have to do them all manually? That would take FOREVER, for something that probably won't even get indexed and if so will only pass a tiny bit of link juice onto your site. It doesn't seem like a time-efficient strategy to bother manually creating social bookmarking sites.

3) Forum spam and comment spam are both at all time highs. In fact, Google will soon be ignoring forum spam (there's an article posted about it somewhere... basically Goog knows that forum spam is used by internet marketers and pretty soon it's not going to count when factoring your SERPs and may possibly result in a penalty) and same thing with comment spam. "OH WOW YOUR ARTICLE WAS SO INTERESTING PLEASE VISIT MY SITE FOR [insert link]." Surely Google must know that a large percentage of social bookmark sites are just BS spam from IMers, so how viable of a strategy is it, really?

It just seems to me like you'd sit around all day manually creating accounts and submitting links to your website (since all of the tools that claim to do it automatically don't work) and then maybe a small percentage of those actually get indexed and give you a little boost in the SERPs. And how many HOURS did you spend doing that?

What am I missing here?

Thanks guys.
Click to expand...

High quality manual comment spam, if done right, will send you flying up the serps. Stealth networks are also effective. Learn the skills and apply - it is worth the time to learn and to implement.

Google are not omnipotent and can still be tricked, no matter what they say. The algorithm has certain conceptual limits which will always have a hard time identifying some spam links.
 
There are still real people who share links on social bookmarking platforms like delicious and reddit and still real people who share links in forums. As long as that is the case, Google dare not apply a blanket discount or blanket ban on these links.

If I were Google this is what I'd do: I'd have a staff team do an assessment of each social networking and bookmarking platform, to check how good the moderators or the peer group within that network are at keeping out the spam, downvoting spam into oblivion and banning accounts.

Then I'd give each platform a score, and program it into my algorithm, so that some platforms and forums would have more weight than others. Note they are relying on the culture of each network to do the policing for them. Therefore if you can sneak into a platform that has spam nazis keeping out everyone else, you are probably onto a winner.

Regarding comments, the same principle applies - Google is relying on the blog owners to do the policing, and they assume that on high traffic, high PR blogs, the owners care about what is posted on their site. So if they approve your comment, google assumes your link is OK.

Same principle applies to web 2.0 platforms - the ones with the strictest community policing and moderation get the highest weight in the search results. Hubpages for instance do well in the SERPs mainly because they no follow links when people's hubscores are low (and if your stuff gets downvoted you lose your hubscore fast). Squdioo for a long time was heavily penalised by Google because they took an open attitude to what was posted on there. Now they've tightened up, they have revived in the SERPs.

There are two ways to exploit this: a) try to get into every bookmarking, forum, web 2.0 and comment site on the chance that you get accepted into the sites that Google favours

b) start off with a), but keep a note of what works and what doesn't and build up your own list of sites to hit, and with some you go in manually (or hire a VA to do it for you).
 
Ok so let's say I'm going to try this social bookmarking thing because I have quite a few blogs that are a few weeks old that are not yet indexed.

I found this list:

digg
technorati
stumbleupon
kaboodle
reddit
fark

Do i just go create accounts there and manually submit each un-indexed blog to each site?


Re: "forum spam not working in the future" I don't mean like sig links, I mean people who create accounts but never post anything but have links in their profile. Some of my competitors have 100s of backlinks like that that just come from forum profiles with no posts, they are obviously spam. There's going to be some sort of "if post count < x then disregard profile links" change to the algorithm at some point.


(the lulzy part is I don't do any of that forum BS and I still outrank that competitor even though I have like 1/10 the number of links that he does)


WOW it is hard to post here when you're a noob. I had to rewrite this post like 10 times because it kept saying I was violating some rule with something that I wrote. lol.
 
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turdface said:
Ok so let's say I'm going to try this social bookmarking thing because I have quite a few blogs that are a few weeks old that are not yet indexed.

I found this list:

digg
technorati
stumbleupon
kaboodle
reddit
fark

Do i just go create accounts there and manually submit each un-indexed blog to each site?
...
Click to expand...
Yeah basically that's what you do. :cool:

From a time vs money standpoint you might be better off just buying a bookmarking package from a seller in the bst forum though. Of course like you mentioned before, you need to find a good service or it's a waste of your money.


If you want to get even more benefit than just seo, you can get better results if you create a page on your site that might actually be the type of page real people might digg (make sure it has internal links back to your main page. Then create multiple profiles on each site (use proxies so the sites don't just delete your accounts). Then interact on the site a little, adding friends and bookmarking other sites as well. Then when your accounts look a little bit legit, go ahead and bookmark the page you made for getting bookmarked. Deeplinked backlinks will still help your overall website listing in the SE.

That's definately a lot more work so most IMers don't bother. But if you do it should make the backlinks be considered a little better by the SE, and it also creates a bit of direct site promotion. Do a good enough job on it and you might even get real people to start bookmarking your pages as well.
 
i don't remember it being so difficult to post when i had a low post count. maybe they made things different.

I tried that "hide my ass" site a while back, too and it didn't work.
Click to expand...
huh

edit: also, there are a lot of words here you can't post, so it's much easier to add periods or something versus spelling things out phonetically as you've done above... example: dofo.llow links.
 
Last edited:
GreyWolf said:
Google's whole indexing strategy is based on links. "Whoever has the most links must be the most popular site." It's definately caused a ridiculous amount of backlinks to be built. What are the odds that a local auto repair shop in Birmingham, Alabama is going to naturally have 10,000 backlinks? LOL. But it's the game Google set up, there are only so many backlinks they can discount before their indexing model becomes useless. Without it the search engines would have to go back to indexing sites based on just onpage content. That isn't going to happen, the reason Google took over the field was because their idea actually did give a better indication of which sites people are looking for.

No matter how many marketers are building backlinks on the Social Bookmarking sites, there are real people using those sites too. They might not be the most powerful backlinks you can get but they are the most basic. There's no way Google can just discount those links without ignoring the real links that interested users are also making.

What looks like is happening with Google isn't so much that any particular backlink types are becoming useless. It looks like they're just trying to make better evaluations about which ones seem the most legit. That's not an easy task to achieve.

Rather than just giving up on any particular type of links, it's a better idea to just try to get a more natural appearance to their growth and a little more effort on their quality. Social Networking Sites and Social Bookmarking Sites are still the best places to start doing large scale backlinking. They're still the most likely place that a real site will get truly organic links from real people. Because of that they're the first places that Google would expect to start finding them.
Click to expand...

Graywolf..are u wolf-howl?
 
chockomonkey said:
i don't remember it being so difficult to post when i had a low post count. maybe they made things different.
Click to expand...

Like half the posts I make I have to spend 5 minutes trying to find which word they're not allowing.

huh
Click to expand...
There's a proxy called hidemyass. If you go to that address and then add a common suffix to the end of it, it's a proxy. It didn't work for me when I tried using it to create some accounts a while back. Maybe too many people have already used whatever IP it is.
 
turdface said:
So I can't just do it all normally from my computer?
...
Click to expand...
You only need to use proxies if you ever decide to make multiple profiles on the same sites in order to get more bookmarks on a particular site. Digg for example will be much more effective if you can get it dugg from multiple profiles.

The alternative way to get multiple bookmarks for your pages on individual sites without using proxies is to purchase bookmarking packages from sellers that do that service. (For example there's sellers in the bst threads that will get diggs for your page from multiple accounts to give you a chance of getting on the first page of digg.)

If all you want to do is set up single accounts on each bookmarking site to get a single backlink on each site then you won't need to use proxies.

Hope that explains it better.



deface said:
Graywolf..are u wolf-howl?
Click to expand...
No, the wolf howl blog is by Michael Gray who goes by the handle GrayWolf.

I hadn't even heard of GrayWolf when I chose my nick here. I've used GreyWolf or just Wolf as a handle for years. Of course I use the proper spelling of 'grey' in my nick. LOL.

GreyWolf
 
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Alright I decided to create some social bookmark accounts and bookmark one blog from each of them and see which ones gets indexed in an attempt to determine which social bookmark sites are worth my time.

My questions:

Technorati - I cannot figure out how to add a site. Their ping site is no longer in use.

Kaboodle - how do you add a new site? I read a tutorial, but there was no option to "add a new site" to your list, as the tutorial said there would be. I do not want to download and install the Kaboodle toolbar/button, so I'm trying to do it manually.

Propeller - I got some crazy message saying it couldn't create my account because "Sign in is from an unknown referring location." Wtf does that mean? I googled it and there was one person on a forum somewhere who had the same problem but no solution was given.
 
turdface said:
Alright I decided to create some social bookmark accounts and bookmark one blog from each of them and see which ones gets indexed in an attempt to determine which social bookmark sites are worth my time.
Click to expand...

Update 5 days later.

I bookmarked sites with Y! Buzz, Delicious, Mixx, and Fark.

As of 5 days later, none of them is indexed yet.

Am I doing something wrong or does it take longer?
 
make a twitter account for each blog and put your url in your profile for each. that should get u some google love right away, after you make a few tweets.
 
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