101 Articles Social Bookmarking Spam
SOCIAL BOOKMARKING SPAM
Social bookmarking is a way to store and share data with the power of internet to reach anyone around the world. Social bookmarking evolved from traditional bookmarking techniques, where a user will add a website or webpage that he likes to his favorites so that he can access it later for research, reading or other purposes. Internet explorer and other leading browsers all have options to add your favorite website to your bookmarks.
Social or shared bookmarking has been there since 1996, when ilist.com gave the users option to save websites for later reference. But that was just sharing websites and it failed to become big. But in the starting of 2004, sites like del.icio.us, digg, reddit, stumbleupon have increased the popularity of social bookmarking. These sites not only have the ability to bookmark them but give the users to share their opinion on what they feel about a particular image or an article or a video. More people bookmarking a webpage, more popular it becomes and features on front page of social bookmarking websites.
Different social bookmarking websites perform in different ways. Someone gives the users right to vote for a particular page, share it with their users, some give them option to tag to different topics.
Social bookmarking is an important tool, for search engine optimization experts. Social and reputation goes along well and using the power of social bookmarking your site ranking can be vastly improved. Social bookmarking has various positive factors and can help you boost your ranking in multiple ways. So many SEO experts started using social bookmarking as a part of SEO that started as 'a can of worms', virtually flooded the bookmarking sites with junk useless bookmarks.
There are numerous SEO companies offering social bookmarking services as a part of their SEO service or as a separate service. Some of them write legitimate and quality articles create really interesting stuff and make it popular by more bookmarks but most of the companies offering are just spamming the bookmarking sites with junk articles, useless images etc. Most of the articles submitted to social bookmarking sites are gibberish and most of them are not even readable. Social bookmarking sites offer the ability to include a backlink to the site in the description or title of the article or anything that is bookmarked. These links are picked up search engines and it helps in faster indexing, better ranking etc.
Digg, a popular social bookmarking site was so spammed that they started using nofollow for all the submissions they get. Almost all the social bookmarking sites use nofollow tag as default for all submissions they get. If the search engines are not there, there will never be a need for them to add nofollow. Spammers create multiple accounts to artificially inflate a page's vote count which might result in 1st page visibility for a junk article. This is happening and has happened in future with popular sites like DIGG, delicious etc.
Many site owners use social bookmarking sites to see / read interesting stuff and also pick links from the sites to include in favorite on their website. This is a good way to get natural backlinks and spammers abuse this by adding as many bookmarks as possible expecting at least some to be picked up by potential people looking for interesting WebPages to link to.
Some SEO experts will recommend, following social bookmarking submission, where they get a list of sites that allow the backlink power to pass and get links only from those websites. You can easily come across sites offering 300 social bookmarking services for a cheap price. All these are just to spam the search engines and get a bunch of junk backlinks which will not deliver its purpose.
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The reason behind the spammers doing social bookmarking is for gaining traffic in their sites, for crawlers to visit their sites, for one way linking and for getting higher page rank.
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Other sites that refer to the same manipulation tactic are as follows: |