Social Bookmarking and SEO

Social Bookmarking is the practice of saving bookmarks to a
public Web site and “tagging” them with keywords. Basically, is uses the concept of “bookmarking” but extends it to include internet technology. So instead of bookmarking sites on your local computer, you bookmark sites that you like through web services. This way, your bookmarking process remains the same; the only difference is where the bookmarks are stored. By being stored on the internet, it gives other people access to your bookmarks, and allows people to create “group” categories in which they can collaborate to create a list of resources about a particular topic.

Also, the sites where you bookmark allow you to “tag” your entries. Once you select a site to bookmark, you can also assign a few words, or “tags” to your bookmark, which allow the bookmarking service to easily categorize the link that you added. This way, if other people search their site for a similar topic, they can find a link to the sites you have bookmarked by using keyword, persons, or popularity. Tagging allows you to share the benefit of your research and favorite sites by allowing others to find them. However, if you wish, you can also choose to keep your bookmarks private.

The technology behind social bookmarking is not complex, which means the threshold to participate is low, both for Web sites offering such services and for users. As the landscape for online resources changes and new
systems of classifying those resources emerge and mature, the design and function of databases themselves may ultimately be changed to accommodate new ways of managing information.

Most Popular Social Bookmark Communities

del.icio.us - Del.icio.us allows you to register for an account, and then you can immediately begin bookmarking. Adding buttons to your toolbars facilitates the process of tagging as you surf, and quickly accessing your bookmark account. If enough people bookmark a page, it will then rank higher when people search for topics that appear in the tags.

Digg - Digg is unique in that it allows people to submit articles, the other users “digg” the article if they found it helpful. The more times your article is “dugg” , the higher it’ll appear in the rankings. This can result in a large amount of traffic to your site.

Technorati - You can add technorati tags to your blog posts or pages. You simply add a link using the specific technorati tag that you want, including specific tags on the link, and technorati will pick those up.

Social Bookmarking Effects on SEO

Social bookmarking is already having an effect on search engine optimization. Search engines can use the data available to them through social bookmarking by: counting the bookmarks as votes, using tags to help categorize data, using bookmarks to enhance link popularity counts.

Votes

By spidering social bookmarking sites and identifying how many sites have bookmarked or voted for your site, the engines can use this data as a modifier for their rankings. If you get a lot of bookmarks, this could then increase your SE rankings.

Link Popularity

If many sites have bookmarked your pages, this means that there will be links to your site from other pages (social bookmarking sites). The engines can then use this data for their link popularity counts. Additionally, if you rank well in the social bookmarking site, this will give your site additional exposure, thus allowing other people to find and link to your site.

Tagging

Based on how users tag your site, the engines can use this data for their semantic analysis. So, if your article is tagged with the word “computers” , the engines can add this data to the info they have about your site and improve your rankings in the “computers” keyword category.

Crawling

The engines crawl sites such as technorati and del.icio.us often. So, if people bookmark or vote for your site, it’ll help your page get crawled quicker.

What Now?

First of all, visit all these sites and spend some time there learning about the sites and how they work. Read their help pages and get to know them.

Then, you can create an account and bookmark your pages from your own account.

Additionally, you can encourage other people to bookmark or vote for your site by adding those links / buttons to your pages. Visit this page to get the relevant code:

http://ekstreme.com/seo/socialbookmarkingcode.php

You can add these to the code of your site so people can instantly “dig” your site or add it to their delicious bookmarks.

Here’s another one:
http://www.toprankresults.com/tools/social-bookmark.php

Social Bookmarking Link List: You will want to subscribe to many, if not all of these services.

• Technorati
• IceRocket
• BlogPulse
• Blodex - Top Blogged Stories
• Blogsearch.com
• Gada - Graphic Meta Search Engine
• Furl.net - Latest Headline Entries
• CodeCubed - Tree Map (based on Del.icio.us)
• Flickr
• BlinkList
• Connotea - Scientific Tags
• De.lirio.us (Del.icio.us clone)
• Digg
• Furl
• Blogmarks
• KB Cafe Tag Search
• Bloghop
• Simpy
• Oishii - Most Popular Bookmarks
• Citeulike - Free Citation Service
• Common Times - Reader Controlled News
• Wists - Social Shopping
• Spurl
• Scuttle
• Frassle
• GiveALink - Donate Bookmarks
• Netvous
• Memeorandum
• Ask Jeeves (now uses tags)
• LinkFilter
• Hyperlinkomatic
• FeedMarker
• Diigo
• Quimble - Poll on Favorite Social Bookmarking Manager
• StumbleUpon
• Riffs - Social Recommender
• RawSugar
• Linkagogo
• Gibeo.net
• Linkroll
• OpenBM - (Open Bookmarks)
• Bloogz
• Findory
• Wink

I’ve come accross many sites where Google estimates there are more pages indexed, than pages available on the server.

For example, one of our clients has a site with about 10,000 informational pages. Google says that their site has over 200K pages indexed.

If this happens to you, here’s what you can do:

Go over the pages you can find in the Google index. Make notes of the ones that seem odd to you in any way and inspect those pages manually. Use a server header checker, and make sure they return a “200 OK” code (or perhaps “304 Not Modified”). If Google has pages listed as belonging to your site, but they are not there, request a removal. Obviously, you can’t do this with 200k pages, but if you have a smaller site, this would work for you.

Then, go over your site with a fine tooth comb. Even try to break it by entering URLs that you know isn’t there, and/or url’s that look a lot like those that are there (eg. “.htm” in stead of “.html” or “index” in stead of “index.php”, or “filename.htm/foldername/filename.htm”). Whenever you manage to get a page shown on an URL that shouldn’t show anything, close that hole.

You may want to also write to Google explaining the situation to make sure nothing happens to the site. A simple letter explaining the situation may help get the site reviewed and added to the “safe” list.

Google, SEO, Search engine optimization

Today someone asked me about URL’s that show with spaces in Google. When they do a site:domain.com query, they find URL’s from their site that have an added space. When they check the coding and the pages, they are coded correctly without spaces.

If you find this, DON’T WORRY.

Google adds spaces in the SERP’s so that the URL’s don’t break the screen for smaller resolution monitors. But Google has the pages correctly indexed.