Just how useful are Social Bookmark Sites for SEO Purposes?

[gky45]

With more and more Social Bookmark sites using the rel="nofollow" convention after links it begs the question how vaild and useful are some of these Sites anyway?

Bearing in mind the whole sales pitch of the "Tag and Ping" Brigade was to get more and more links tagged on these directories, get them pinged and thus get Googlebot, msnbot and slurp to index the links and reflect back on the "linked to" site as inbound links creating "authority" sites etc.

With most sites now using these rel="nofollow" commands how can this system work?

If, the other side of posting to Bookmark directories was to get Human traffic then great and the the inbound relevant link effect that accrued as a by product of this then fine.

It seems to be that with rel="nofollow" the inbound link issue is now open to question?

Anyone got any views?

Patrick

[Feydakin]

Philosophically, if you are participating in social networking for the links and not the social side of it, then you are doing it for the wrong reasons anyway..

If the sites are driving traffic then don't worry about the nofollow tag.. If they aren't driving traffic than don't worry about trying to get the link..

[gky45]

Originally Posted by Feydakin

Philosophically, if you are participating in social networking for the links and not the social side of it, then you are doing it for the wrong reasons anyway..

If the sites are driving traffic then don't worry about the nofollow tag.. If they aren't driving traffic than don't worry about trying to get the link..

I agree with you there but the point that I was making was that not a day seems to go by without some idiot coming out with one piece of software after another all promising the holy grail of an endless supply of inbound links that will help you with your SEO and they all seem to be targetting the Social Bookmark Directories.

Now it seems to me that this is now pretty pointless. With the adoption of the rel="nofollow" command this makes this exercise pretty worthless.

My other point is this. If the engines are now trying to crack down on "link spam" / worthless two way links then if you had loads of tags and book marks to your own sites (as loads do) and now they are all covered with rel="nofollow" then how much damage is that going to do to you? Surely these links will now be seen as almost spam as the "nofollow" command effectively says that "this is a link but not anything to do with us / we can't vouch for the usefulness, worth etc."

If the latter is the case and the various bots discover all these previously existing links to now be worthless, how much damage is that going to do to the sites that they were pointing to? If you are to believe certain sources then too many of these worthless inbounds will almost certainly harm your sites ranking.

So in actuality, if the rel="nofollow" command actualy prevents the spiders from going any further then it will surely harm your site and if this is the case then surely it is yet another way for some sites to harm their competitors by actually creating links to them?

On the other hand if all the "nofollow" command does is prevent any form of "PageRank / trustworthiness" being passed on to the site but is still usable for spiderable purposes then at least there is no harm done.

[gky45]

As a follow on to my last post I received an email this morning about another new tool called Forum Equalizer doing the rounds. Now this tool apparently posts unlimited postings to forums thereby creating one way back links via signitures etc.

Now there isn't a person on this forum (alright there may be a few) who doesn't appreciate the odd benefit of the one way backlink from their sig when the post on the board.

How long before the rel="nofollow" is taken up on most forums thereby negating the accrued benefit of the links.

My beef is still over the crap I have to tidy up each morning on a couple of my blogs that have been targetted by low life using a comment spamming utility. One blog I have to remove in excess of over 100 pornographic comments / links etc every day.

[Feydakin]

I agree that the spammers ruin everything that they touch.. But social bookmarking is just the latest in a long list of things overrun by spammers.. All the way back to paper direct mail, thru usenet, email, etc etc etc.. They are everywhere because it works.. It makes them money..

As for the side effects of the rel-nofollow, I don't expect to see anyone penalized for their links having this on them.. But I do expect that the loss of links that count will hurt their rankings.. It's no really a penalty, just that they no longer count..

[incrediblehelp]

Remember these websites purpose is to serve a a facilitator of your info/article/posts out others that can lead to a great one-way links.

[gky45]

Originally Posted by incrediblehelp

Remember these websites purpose is to serve a a facilitator of your info/article/posts out others that can lead to a great one-way links.

But how can they be great one way back links when (if Matt Cutts and his treatise on the use of nofollow tags is to be believed) the existence of "nofollow" commands negates any implied or accrued benefit these links for Bookmarks might otherwise have had.

[incrediblehelp]

Just because he says for blogs to use them doesnt mean they do. Many blogs dont or havent even heard of a nofollow attribute. Many bloggers never heard of SEO!

[gky45]

Originally Posted by incrediblehelp

Just because he says for blogs to use them doesnt mean they do. Many blogs dont or havent even heard of a nofollow attribute. Many bloggers never heard of SEO!

I agree with you on that one, my point was more geared towards the Social Bookmark Sites

[andyf]

Originally Posted by incrediblehelp

Just because he says for blogs to use them doesnt mean they do. Many blogs dont or havent even heard of a nofollow attribute. Many bloggers never heard of SEO!

IMO those blogs must be of personal type, not intended for getting traffic, but just to have their existance.

[bhopkins]

I'm not sure about the no-follow attribute in social bookmarking sites, so I'll need to check on that. I expect people to start gettting banned ( of course does not really do anything since most are signing up with multiple email accounts anyway. I social bookmark my sites but mostly for traffic, but I've noticed that once you Bookmark a site the search engine spider always seems to follow close behind.

My main purpose is not to just get the SE to come( I can always just throw a link on one of my PR6 sites and make that happen anyway), I do it more because in the early days of a site before you get indexed, then if you bookmark correctly and have interesting content, then you can get some traffic and maybe even a few backlinks from the blogs and sites of people that happen to see your site and maybe read an article or two.

Bruce

[janeth]

Originally Posted by gky45

My other point is this. If the engines are now trying to crack down on "link spam" / worthless two way links then if you had loads of tags and book marks to your own sites (as loads do) and now they are all covered with rel="nofollow" then how much damage is that going to do to you? Surely these links will now be seen as almost spam as the "nofollow" command effectively says that "this is a link but not anything to do with us / we can't vouch for the usefulness, worth etc."

Sounds like if your thinking was correct we should start bookmarking our competition sites.

The bookmarking site want hurt you. (- ;

[janeth]

Originally Posted by incrediblehelp

Just because he says for blogs to use them doesnt mean they do. Many blogs dont or havent even heard of a nofollow attribute. Many bloggers never heard of SEO!

The blog software comes with the nofollow tag already in place.

[janeth]

Originally Posted by gky45

How long before the rel="nofollow" is taken up on most forums thereby negating the accrued benefit of the links.

The spammers have been hitting the forums for years and some forums use the nofollow tag but the benefits in the forums, bookmarking sites, blogs and all the other social media sites go way beyond the search engines.

If your using them only for the search engines then your not using the tool properly.

[gky45]

Originally Posted by janeth

The blog software comes with the nofollow tag already in place.

Wordpress doesn't

[janeth]

Originally Posted by gky45

Wordpress doesn't

Yes it does, I've had to remove them from several of my wordpress blogs.

[gky45]

Originally Posted by janeth

Yes it does, I've had to remove them from several of my wordpress blogs.

It only does if the comments are not approved and by someway they are visible. I've just tried on a few of my blogs on Wordpress 2.0.2 and when you approve the comment there is no tag at all (which makes sense)

[janeth]

Wordpress nofollow

WordPress 1.5 (a Weblog/CMS software) comes with “nofollow” enabled by default, with no option to disable it! This plugin provides an option to disable “nofollow” in the most efficient way possible without altering any WordPress code.

Wordpress has nofollow tag

To make it worse, out of the box content publishing systems, like WordPress, have the nofollow tag turned on by default (in the comments section).

And if all that's not good enough we can go to WordPress

It's added automatically by the WP software.

I've removed it from some of my blogs and I know it comes with the blogs.