Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking

Please be aware of the dramatic retooling that has happened with the last update by Google, called Hummingbird. The primary concern is that doing things like bookmarking are clear signs of SEO tactic. There fore the manner in how you do it matters more today than ever. What ever was written a year ago is out dated. Many SEO agencies are hard wired to the skill sets they have used for years along with the associated tools. While this is not automatically a negative, it can be a warning sign of problems to avoid.  Clearly doing things that leave a traceable footprint are to be avoided. The problem with bookmarking it is an optimization method that easily can be detected and at Google’s whim can impact your website negatively. As it is just after the Hummingbird update the issues at play are unlike any previous update because of one primary concern. Hummingbird is learning. It is teaching itself. It already has cataloged what SEO looks like and any thing Google deems rank manipulating by it’s very nature is against it’s terms of service. It is clear you must adjust how you approach getting search rankings.

Google has stated clearly that it does not want to help SEO agencies. Since this is evident in the most recent deletion of the Adwords Keyword tool, the encryption of all their tools, aimed to destroy the connection between the resources they accumulate and the tools created by third parties that are geared to help manipulate the rankings, you no longer can simply decide to rank and use brute force tactics. I included a decent expression of bookmarking below that is on Yahoo Answers  and Wikipedia .

“A good social bookmarking definition begins with the history of the concept. It was first thought of in April of 1996, with the launch of the very first social bookmark, itList.com. From that point on, the business began to grow, and social bookmarking became known for building relevant links, bringing in traffic and new customers, and the other benefits of social bookmarking that businesses can take advantage of.

To define social bookmarking is to examine how they work. Basically links are listed on a network, then whoever has access to that network can search for links that pertain to the keywords that person is searching for. Each link has three keywords associated with it, generally keywords that are optimized on their webpages, and when those keywords are searched for, ideally, it is that particular link that comes up.

The concept of social bookmarking can be compared to personal bookmarks, or favorites lists. These networks allow people to add links they like, not just their own. Social bookmarking can be used by anyone, but is generally utilized for business to business information, or business to consumer information.

When a link is ready to be put into a social bookmarking network, it is first tagged or submitted to a social bookmarking site. It is tagged with three keywords that are optimized on the website, and then a description of the website is added. From that point on, it can be searched through the keywords on the network.

What Does Social Bookmarking Do For Businesses?
No social bookmarking definition can be complete without an analysis of what it can do for businesses. Obviously, social bookmarking has some excellent marketing qualities, or nobody would do it. Some of the ways that social bookmarking helps businesses include:

Building relevant incoming links
Draws visitors
Draws new clients or customers
Helps people find the business
Helps businesses find other businesses
Draws a lot of traffic

Bookmarking Features

Unlike file sharing, social bookmarking does not save the resources themselves, merely bookmarks that reference them, i.e. a link to the bookmarked page. Descriptions may be added to these bookmarks in the form of metadata, so users may understand the content of the resource without first needing to download it for themselves. Such descriptions may be free text comments, votes in favor of or against its quality, or tags that collectively or collaboratively become a folksonomy. Folksonomy is also called social tagging, “the process by which many users add metadata in the form of keywords to shared content”.

In a social bookmarking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks are usually public, and can be saved privately, shared only with specified people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private domains. The allowed people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, or via a search engine.

Most social bookmark services encourage users to organize their bookmarks with informal tags instead of the traditional browser-based system of folders, although some services feature categories/folders or a combination of folders and tags. They also enable viewing bookmarks associated with a chosen tag, and include information about the number of users who have bookmarked them. Some social bookmarking services also draw inferences from the relationship of tags to create clusters of tags or bookmarks.

Many social bookmarking services provide web feeds for their lists of bookmarks, including lists organized by tags. This allows subscribers to become aware of new bookmarks as they are saved, shared, and tagged by other users. It also helps to promote your sites by networking with other social book markers and collaborating with each other.

As these services have matured and grown more popular, they have added extra features such as ratings and comments on bookmarks, the ability to import and export bookmarks from browsers, emailing of bookmarks, web annotation, and groups or other social network features.

What Websites Are Known Social Bookmarks?
There are many websites out there that are known as social bookmarking sites, or define social bookmarking. These sites are meant strictly to list these links and make them searchable. Some of these websites are private and you have to pay a fee to search through them, but others are free for anyone to use, obviously looking for regular people to use them. Some of these social bookmarking websites are:

Technorati.com – A blog and business social bookmarking website
Del.icio.us – A popular social bookmarking service that is the most famous
Yahoo Bookmarks – A bookmarking service hosted by Yahoo.com as one of their many services
Google Bookmarks – Another bookmarking service, hosted by Google.com and intended for normal people as well as businesses to use.