- Buffer
Social Bookmarking Sites – A Thing of the Past?
Do you still spend a fair amount of time using social bookmarking sites to get traffic to your blog or website today? I read a post yesterday by Kazeem James. He claims that social bookmarking is dead. I’m hoping so. We spend so much time promoting our posts and not enough time writing more posts or commenting at other blogs. If you are not sure what it is exactly – here is Wikipedia’s explanation of it:
Social Bookmarking Service is a centralized online service which enables users to add, annotate, edit, and share bookmarks of web documents.”
Social Bookmark Sites Have Been Around
These social bookmarking sites have been around since 1996. That’s 18 years! Not much has lasted that long on the internet. They are also known as “Tagging” a term Delicious coined back in 2003. Many of these type of websites have added a rating feature so people can rate others bookmarks. These bookmarks were indexed by web spiders and thought to be of a great SEO benefit. They were for some time. That is until the spammers took over and Google made changes to adjust to them.
I first noticed a difference with StumbleUpon. I will go out on a limb here, I believe that StumbleUpon is no longer worth it. I know, many still use it and claim it drives traffic. But I’ve found it drives up your bounce rate incredibly. Is that really worth it? Another one I dropped over a year now is Digg. Are you still using either of these 2 sites?
Is Social Network SEO Different?
I believe it is. See the word NETWORK? It’s all about the networking socially. If you want to be on social, you must BE social. Not just bookmarking and moving on. When you form a network it will draw traffic and backlinks to you naturally. Social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Instagram, YouTube, Vine, Tumblr and Pinterest are the places to be on today. I also agree with Kazeem on BizSugar, it’s a great place to network and make new contacts!
How To Better Spend Our Time For Our Blogs
I believe our time can be better spent than doing the same thing over and over again. That’s called insanity, right? Spending time on these social bookmarking sites seems almost pointless today. Here are other productive things you can do instead that will bring you more traffic and more SEO juice:
- Generate More Content – Either writing more blog posts, making a slideshare or doing a video, etc.
- Conversing with Others – Either by commenting on blogs or in the socialsphere as my good friend Corina from Work From Home Concepts calls it.
- Writing an eBook – Writing your first, second or third eBook.
- Writing for Others – Doing guest posts or getting paid to write. Does that sound more worthwhile to you?
- Learn New Things – Whether it’s to clean up your blog or add some new plugins, you have to learn more. (I tried to install a new pop-up the other day and got a fatal error message, back to the drawing board I go.)
I’d love to know if you are still using those social bookmarking sites and how often.
Do you think they still have any value today in 2014?
Image courtesy of photoraidz / FreeDigitalPhotos.net