Social Bookmarking Meets SEO

Social Bookmark sites generally have large user bases, are active, informative and full of interesting information. As such they are absolutely loved by Google and other search engines. Their main pages have high PRs and if you’re lucky enough to get an article on the front page of a single site, the chances are you’ll see a big jump in your SEO results.

Front Page News

In the early days of Google, your rank depended almost entirely upon the content in your pages, how often it was updated and what kind of information was on the rest of your site. When people started to use SEO and cater for the search engines, the search engines reacted with PR. PR was designed to try and identify the worth of a page on outside factors as well as the existing inside factors and give a more accurate reading on how high a page should rank. PageRank determines how early in the search results your site comes and so a low PR page might show up in page 8 of Googles results, whereas a high PR site may show up in the first 10 results of the first page. While the exact algorithm of Googles PR has never been disclosed, webmasters have figured out basically how it functions.

The main things it looks at are on-page factors like

 The Title
 The text of the page
 The titles on the page in <h1> and <h2> tags
 Bold, italic or underlined text
 The text of links to pages of other sites
 The text of links to pages on the same site

It also looks at off-site factors, such as

 How many sites link to the page?
 What is the text of those links?
 What is the category or theme of the pages linking?
 What is the PR of the site where the linking page is based?
 What is the PR of the linking page itself?

But what does this have to do with Social Bookmarking? Well, most Bookmark sites have large user bases and are very active. They have daily, hourly, sometimes minutely updated links and content. They are popular and have many people linking to their content, not to mention the thousands upon thousands of people who use Social Bookmark icons on their sites (these are all counted as incoming links). These are exactly the kind of things that Googles PR is looking for and as such, most Social Bookmark sites are seen as valuable to Google and have high PR on their main pages. StumbleUpon.com, for example, has a PR 7 on their main page. This is very high and if you were lucky enough to write an interesting enough article or page that was placed on the front page for a short time not only would you receive a huge amount of incoming traffic but you’d increase your PR and search engine ranking as a result. This strategy can be used to devastating effect to get you many highly valuable incoming links at no cost whatsoever.

Along with the huge influx of traffic and jump in PR you are likely to receive, you can also expect a reasonable amount of exposure. If your article or page is interesting and has broader appeal, you will see a rush of incoming links from various pages and sites.

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