17 Social Sites To Spam For Backlinks
Okay deceiving headlines is not a tactic I usually use but I wanted to catch your attention with this one! I had a rather disturbing email today in response to my recent post warning of the dangers of including StumbleUpon in automated bookmarking tools. My reader asked the question:
“I’m just wondering whether StumbleUpon is the only social bookmarking that we shouldn’t spam?”
It Is Never Okay To Spam!
The first thought that popped into my head when I read that is that my post must somehow have sounded as if I was advocating spamming social bookmarking sites which of course is not the case. There is always an eyebrow raised when a tool comes out to automate a process which would usually be done manually. Automation saves time and usually allows the process to be done en-masse which is the case here.
The question is, how do you know what is spam and what isn’t?
Spam is a form of unwanted marketing in some form. Unwanted by whom? Unwanted by the recipient. Therefore whenever you market anything the question you should be asking yourself is, “will the recipient of this message want to hear what I have to say?”.
Private Bookmarking Has No Recipient
I’m struggling to find the right words to explain the difference between what I consider to be pure ‘bookmarking’ sites and all the other types of social sites in which other people are the recipient of your submissions. In the comments to the post Peter Buick called it the “reviewer quality score”. When you submit a page to StumbleUpon who is the recipient? The entire StumbleUpon community? When you submit a story to Digg who is the recipient? The entire Digg community. When you bookmark a page in del.icio.us who is the recipient? YOU ARE!
It just so happens that del.icio.us makes their bookmarks public so if other people want to come along and see what you have bookmarked then they are free to do so but you are not submitting the bookmark for the approval other other delicious users – they are your personal bookmarks. It matters not what other people think of them. There is no voting up of the bookmarks.
In my list of do-follow social bookmarking sites I am very careful in my selection to only include sites that have no voting component. I have had people ask me to include this site or that site and when I go and look at it I see a voting system and it doesn’t get included. Do you see the difference? When you are the only recipient of your submissions then you cannot spam yourself! As soon as other people are invited to view and vote upon your submission you introduce the possibility of spam.
Voting Based Sites Still Have A Place
I just thought I’d point out that sites like Digg, Reddit and the hundreds of other niche social sites have a place in social media but only if your content matches the subject of the site and this is where so many marketers get it wrong. I was banging my head against the wall in last year’s Thirty Day Challenge because every single day there would be messages on the forums from people confused at why their social media accounts had got banned. Why did the Digg audience not like my article about toenail clipping? Spend some time at Digg and find out…
The problem with the automated tools such as social marker is that they encourage marketers to just mass submit their content to a whole bunch of sites, many of which are highly inappropriate. This is pure laziness of behalf of the marketer. I could go and write a long post about this but the essence is that if you are going to submit some content to a site where the recipient is other people then you need to make damn sure that your content is relevant to that audience.
The way I see bookmarking is as a backlink building process and not a traffic building process. If you want traffic from Digg then that is a whole different beast and you might want to spend some time reading some of Skellie’s recent articles on that subject. If you want traffic from StumbleUpon then of course you’re enrolled on my course right? :-)
What I am trying to get across is that if you use an automated tool then make sure you do your homework first. If you are using that tool just to submit bookmarks to pure bookmarking sites with no recipient other than yourself then fine but if you start to include other sites then you are entering dangerous waters and this is where you need to make sure you know your audience and know that your content provides value to that audience or you can kiss your account goodbye!
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Hi Caroline,
My question about this strategy is: does it work? The whole point of all these bookmarks is to get backlinks to our site and content. So, you have a list of sites that are dofollow. In theory, we should get tons of backlinks from them.
However, for a time I used your list and submitted bookmarks to the top ones, all which are dofollow sites (Backflip, Bibsonomy, etc). I verified the links to make certain that they were. But, when I go into Google Webmaster Tools, and check all my pages with external links, NONE of these dofollow links show up. Not a single one.
I did about 30 articles over a few months on 6 sites. I should have had 180 links. But Google reports -0-.
So, my questions are:
1. Are there better ways to verify backlinks? Is Google Webmaster Tools not accurate?
2. Does Google know that Backflip, Linkagogo, etc, are all filled with IM and thus it ignores the dofollow?
3. Is this strategy no longer effective?
Thanks for the answers!
A follow-up to my last comment: dofollow blogs DO show up at Google Webmaster Central. Every time I leave comment on a dofollow blog, I do get a backlink according to Google.
Tom Stine | Spiritual Life Coachs last blog post..What Do Enlightened Guys Look Like?
@Tom, to be honest, I don’t know. I don’t use this strategy for this blog, I only used it for one niche site which I haven’t worked on in months so I never really did any extensive testing. I’ll be trying it out again in August/September when I build some new niche sites though.
Hi Caroline,
Very interesting post and subject, and intuitive replies.
I just read your other post about using multiple accounts on social networks. While I have to agree that spamming anyone, or any site is wrong, be it a social network, forum, blog, guestbook or whatever, one also should see the SEO power of these sites if used properly, and I stress, properly.
There has always been a fine line between SEO and spam, which is probably why Google hates SEO. Too many folks dont know where to stop when promoting, and cross that ever so faint line (or just completely smash through it with no regard). One or two useful posts here and there can be SEO and still be classy. I guess the golden rule prevails yet again. What would you want someone posting on your site, blog, or forum?
-Shaun
Hi caroline,
Now I know that Delicious is a NO follow boorkmark.
Thanks for the article
edhitoks last blog post..Android will present in the end of 2008
Thanks for the info Caroline.
It’s never ok to spam, but you can build a ton of legit backlinks using a few special tools.
Some include good article disributing services and socialbookmarking tools.
I love SENuke.
- Steve
I was Submitting too many inner Pages to Social Book Marking Sites, One day I lost the Position as well as Remove by Google Search Engine.
rajkumars last blog post..Collections Of Notes( Armenia)
I guess social bookmarking should just be one of several back linking strategies. And if you don’t go overboard with on these strategies you should just be fine.
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Great post, the key is post good content slow and steady. Thanks for the tips.
Thanks for writing this article. I think that every Internet Marketer has to respect the sites that they are marketing in.
Hey, it’s preety good thought among the general understanding about social bookmarks.
Building quality and providing the best, not by some horrible invasion to the social bookmarks.
I am new in this activity, needs a lot of double side thought to improvement
An ethical dilema indeed. We need to make quite subtle distinctions. So subtle that almost all website promoters are going to cross the line at some point. Some of us don’t really know where the line is. But thanks for your efforts to tease out the ethics of a complex situation.
I am just starting to use Social Bookmarking to promote my websites. I’ve already been banned by one news site. I didn’t really understand that they were different from the others, so I guess I should be grateful for the lesson.
I’m not sure that I know enough to prevent it happening again with other sites, even with your kind guidelines.
But apart from getting banned (which made me feel bad!) I do feel that this link-building is a somewhat tacky activity. Perhaps I’d be happier if the social bookmarking sites were clearly divided into two camps, those which welcomed links to quality web pages posted by owners (or owner’s friends, or other interested parties) and those which did not.
I suspect there would be very few in the first camp, and most of those would be no-followers.
I wish Google would put their efforts into better-evaluating the quality of web pages based on on-page factors and relevance to the search query – rather than the number (and quality) of backlinks. Those backlinks say very little about the quality or relevance of the content. They mainly indicate the amount of time and effort that was spent promoting the web page.
In fact, as a frequent Google searcher, I am often offered well-promoted, high-ranking websites which do not really relate well to my (very specific) search term. I have to scroll down, sometimes a few pages, before I find what I was looking for. On occasion I’ve got fed up and used Yahoo Search instead.
That gives me hope that Google might change their strategy. If it’s not working for their searchers, then it won’t be working for Google!
It seems that, as a website developer, I have to spend 80% of my time “promoting” my content, which leaves only 20% for developing it. And millions of website developers are all doing the same thing. What a waste of our collective resources!
And on top of that, a whole industry has developed around teaching us all how to rank better in Google. Their efforts would surely be better directed at teaching us how to produce better content.
Sorry about the rant. I feel better now.
I wanted to say…seems the Google algorithm is probably trying to find the most natural way which is others without your help or prompting…stumbling, finding, discovering, bookmarking, tweeting (and whatever else) and plain old linking to your site. Isn’t that the way this should work? Self promotion 5% and promotion by others 95% I say…
Michael Erik´s last blog ..Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-02-21