Link Building #1 – Social Bookmarking

This next part of the project with focus on the link building methods I have been using to drive backlinks to the niche sites to help them rank for their chosen keywords. The first technique that I use is called social bookmarking but as this is the first post in the series I’ll also give a short introduction to link building in general and why we want to do it.

The Purpose of Link Building

To give a very simplistic view of link building, if Google sees two web pages that have been equally optimised for a particular keyword, then it will look at the backlinks to determine which one to rank higher. There’s only so much you can do in terms of on-page optimisation. Once you have your keyword in your title, your url, tags, sprinkled throughout your text, perhaps in image tags and so on, at that point anything else that you do to the page itself will have minimal impact and it all falls down to backlinks.

Not all Link Building is Equal

You can get a little bit too simplistic and think that it is just about the number of links but that is not so. There are many factors that determine how valuable a particular backlink is, for example:

• Whether or not it has the “no-follow” tag
• The PageRank of the linking page
• The anchor text used in the link
• The relevancy of the linking page to the target page

The best quality backlink would therefore be a do-followed (or, lack of no-follow to be accurate), high PR link from a relevant site using the anchor text of your target keyword. A poor quality backlink would be a no-follow link from a PR0 site that has no relevancy to your site and uses totally irrelevant anchor text. Just one good quality backlink can be equivalent to thousands of low quality ones – it is not just about quantity!

With regards to PageRank there is a rough formula that states that a PR1 backlink is worth 10 PR0’s and a PR2 is worth 10 PR1’s and so on. So you can imagine the power of getting even just a handful of backlinks from relevant PR6 or above sites!

Poor Quality Backlinks Are Better Than No Backlinks!

Some people get obessive about the quality of backlinks and refuse to employ certain types of link building methods deeming them as inferior to the good quality links that I describe above. However, even a very low quality link is worth more than no link at all. However there are exceptions… if you get backlinks from what Google determines is a ‘bad neighbourhood’ then that backlink can actually hurt you. You don’t want to be getting backlinks from porn sites, gambling sites, or anything that seems dubious! But other than that, it is worth getting all the links you have time for.

How Does Social Bookmarking Help Build Links?

Social bookmarking is a bit like your browser favourites but stored online on a website rather than on your computer and associated with a browser. The social part comes into play by those bookmarks being public which allows other people to see what you have bookmarked. There are tons of these kinds of sites around and there are some subtle differences between some of them which I’ll discuss in a moment.

The cool thing about this practice is that you can bookmark the individual content pages of your site and not just the home page. This is called ‘deep linking’ and its a good thing to do because very often it will be an individual page on your site that ranks for your keyword and not necessarily the home page. Not only that but because there are so many of these bookmarking sites to use, if you get into the habit of submitting every piece of content to a bunch of them you can build quite a lot of backlinks fairly quickly.

Do-Follow Social Bookmarking SItes

Over a year ago I wrote a post which listed around 20 social bookmarking sites that were do-follow. Most of them either use the no-follow tag or they use some internal linking mechanism that hides the real URL and so does not count as a backlink. This post is one of my highest trafficked posts on this blog and to keep it relevant I update it every couple of months. The last update was at the beginning of October.

I suggest you start with that post. The list in that post is what I have used to bookmark all the content from my niche sites for this project and I use the method described in the post. However, that post is a list of what I call ‘pure bookmarking’ sites – I do not include any site that has any kind of voting system. The reason for this is described at length in another post I wrote about social bookmarking vs story submission but the essence is this: when you link to your content at a pure bookmarking site, you are just storing it for your later retrieval. But when you link to your content page at a site that has a voting element you are effectively saying to the community, “hey look at my page – I think you’ll like it, please vote for it”. Now that is absolutely fine if your content is relevant and therein lies the problem for so many Internet marketers that begin with this bookmarking without fully understanding it.

Sites like Social Marker make it very easy to bookmark your link to a whole bunch of sites at once but they lump them all together – they will even throw StumbleUpon in there and I have also warned of the dangers of including StumbleUpon in your social bookmarking efforts. When you submit to a site that allows the community to vote, you must be respectful of the kind of content that the community likes. Why? Well firstly it’s the right thing to do, but for the ethically challenged – not doing so gets your account banned so it is simply a waste of time not to play by the rules.

Guidelines for Responsible Bookmarking

This is one of those areas that can venture into spam if you’re not careful but where do you draw the line? Well let’s get one thing straight here – bookmarking sites want your links! Without them they would not exist so don’t feel bad for using many of them in your link building campaign. However, what they don’t want is fake accounts, duplicate content, spam content and so on.

I’ve been getting irritated by some of the shortfalls of social bookmarker and have been looking around for some better automated tools. The best of the bunch seems to be one called Bookmarking Demon but I won’t link to it as I don’t recommend it. The copy of the sales letter seems to promote spam. They advertise a feature to allow you to automatically create an unlimited number of accounts at the sites so you can bookmark the same links over and over! This is pure spam! So even though some of the features of the tool look good, I can’t bring myself to buy it though I’d be interested to hear opinions of those who have used it.

So some guidelines to follow – have only one account at each site, and bookmark each page only once. Secondly, think about SEO before submitting. When using a tool such as social marker to speed things up its easy to get lazy and just do it as quickly as possible but then you are missing out on the benefits. The idea of link building is to increase the keyword authority of the pages within your site. Most of the bookmarking sites will want a title, a description and some tags as well as the link. Make sure your primary keyword is in all of those places and don’t forget to use tags for those awkward keywords that are difficult to write for.

Lastly, I don’t have a list of social news sites such as Digg, Reddit and so on but I know a man who does :-) There was a blog called Traffickd which I think has stopped publishing now but they have posted a great list of social sites organised into niches. There are other such lists on the Internet if you Google around. Find your niche, find relevant social sites in that niche and add those to your submission routine.

One last point but its a trickier one to implement – ideally, you would spread out your backlinks over time. This is especially relevant if you have an existing site and have not used this method. Don’t go and bookmark all your pages in one go and add hundreds of links at once because Google will view that as suspicious. Social marker is an immediate service unfortunately so if you want to spread your links out over a period of days you have to do it manually. But a reasonable guideline to follow is – don’t bookmark more than one page from the same domain in any one day. What should you do if you are using this technique with a busy site that publishes lots of content daily? Simple – pick the best piece of content each day and bookmark that, leave the rest.

I’m actually thinking of developing my own social bookmarking tool to overcome these issues. It would also be nice if it could run completely on auto-pilot – you just load it up with your information, click a button and let it build those links slowly over the next few days.

Right now this is just an idea and I’m not even sure if there is any real demand for such a tool. If you would be interested then join my notification list below and if I see enough response I’ll begin working on it and use the list to let you know of any developments:

Link Building with Social Bookmarking Sites Summary

Here are the golden rules:

1. Only bookmark good content, don’t bookmark your porn site!
2. Only bookmark one page from a domain in one day
3. Use only one account at every site
4. Bookmark at all the generic bookmarking sites
5. Bookmark at a handful of niche-specific sites
6. Always optimise your submissions for SEO

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