In January 2005 there was a post in Official Google Blog that I would linke to qote here:

From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn’t a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it’s just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists.

In a few weeks other search engines, like Yahoo and MSN, agreed to take into consideration the nofollow attribute of the links their spiders find while crawling. Originally this attribute was introduced to prevent people spam other people’s blogs with comments that contain nothing but links to some sites. If you have a blog yourself, you of course saw such comments linking to sites promoting viagra and texas holdem poker. Later other techniques of link spam appeared, including mass-submission of links to social bookmarking sites. Thus, most social bookmarking sites also introduced nofollow attribute for all the links that are bookmarked by the people. Some sites, like blogmarks.net and netvouz.com have not yet done so, but one can expect them to join the rest pretty soon.

However, the top social bookmarking sites I listed in my previous post can influence search engine results and traffic to the sites you promote even while using the nofollow attribute on all of their pages.

1. The first site most of you have already heard about is del.icio.us. It is the most popular of all the social bookmarking sites and it’s popularity became it’s power. Some people would use del.icio.us instead of a common search engine if the amount of irrelevant data in SERPs for their query seems overwhelming. Lots of other sites all over the web like tagvy.com, travelicio.us, tagcentral.net and many, many others would syndicate data from del.icio.us for some of the tags people use to describe their links at del.icio.us. The sites I’ve listed publish links for many tags, but it’s not a rare practice that some blog writing, for example, about SEO, would contain somewhere in the blog sidebar several latest links that people tagged as relevant to SEO. And the features I like most about del.icio.us is their export and import. Because all the links you have added to del.icio.us can be exported together with all tags and descriptions in several various formats and del.icio.us seems to be the only place where you can collect bookmarks and then import them from there to loads of other sites and applications that work with bookmarks. Even browsers offer less functionality than del.icio.us.
2. Once you have added several sites to del.icio.us, you can export the links and add them to Yahoo MyWeb. The peculiarity of this service is that it’s integrated in Yahoo and once the page you submitted to this service appears on any SERP in Yahoo, it will stand out on the page and look different from all the other results in the SERP. Yahoo will indicate how many people have saved this very page into Yahoo MyWeb, and as so far very few pages are saved there, this really makes a difference.
3. The last service from this top 3 I want to talk about, is not just a site, the most important feature with Stumbleupon is their toolbar. Once the toolbar installed you can vote for or against any page on the web. Or, if you feel bored, click on Stumble! button on the toolbar and the service will forward you to a random site according to your interests and the chances you land on some particular site are as high as the number of positive votes from the toolbar users. Of course, this would not help you if you are promoting something dull and something that only a small audience would understand, but once your site sells or offers something interesting, you should try Stumbleupon. So far we had very nice results with it for several sites.

And I would not recommend you the following websites for your SEO efforts: lilisto.com, linkagogo.com, unalog.com, igooi.com, hyperlinkomatic.com, zurpy.com and looklater.com. I’m not saying that these sites a bad or useless, but for me they were not worth the time I spent trying to figure out how they work and testing them for the sites I’m promoting. However, you might have a different experience.

Tags: del.icio.us, google, MSN, nofollow, SEO, SERP, stumbleupon, yahoo, Yahoo MyWeb
Posted in SEO | 4 Comments »

Social bookmarking seems to be the web 2.0 version of what catalogues and directories were originally created for back when the web was born – sites that contain useful links. Or trusted links. Or categorized links. All kinds of links.

But with social bookmarking instead of a few trusted editors for each directory (or topic within the directory as in DMOZ) here comes the power of the crowd that chooses the best sites and pages, instead or limited number of categories – myriads of tags that describe the links as precisely as possible and instead of just one place where the link would be found in a catalog, one wise submission to a social bookmaking site might mean tens or hundreds of links to your site syndicated all over the Internet.

Submitting your link to social bookmarking sites might seem a nice alternative to submitting it to directories. You do not have to wait till the link is approved by the editor (it will appear at the site at once, you can add as many tags describing the links as you need, and much more. If you just want to keep your bookmarks somewhere online instead of just within your browser and share selected links with a few friends and colleagues then any of social bookmarking sites will do for you. You can even go to semi-automatic submission to several sites, with the help of this tool for example.

You can test it on our page if you like: Socialize this page

If you follow this link above, you’ll get a list of services the link will be submitted to. And choosing any service in which you already have an account will bring you directly to the page where you add your link. You will not even have to type the link and page title into each form, the tool will do that for you.

But of course for each good idea there will be people who misuse it. People who will try to spam the social bookmarking sites. And of course these sites will fight such spammers. Some sites would use redirects instead of direct links. Some sites would use nofollow. This means that while any site from the list they use at
this Socializer tool will be fine for just using it to store your link collection not each and every one of them will be fine for SEO. My own top list will include del.icio.us, Yahoo MyWeb and stumbleupon.com and in the following posts I’ll cover each of them more in detail, explain why I chose these 3 sites and give a list of services that seem a complete waste of time for someone who is promoting a site, not just collecting links for fun or future use.

Tags: catalog, cool links, del.icio.us, dmoz, internet marketing, links, SEO, social bookmarking, social bookmarks, stumbleupon, yahoo
Posted in SEO, cool links, internet marketing | 2 Comments »