Social bookmarking websites are an excellent way to build backlinks to your website. However, many webmasters still don’t understand the proper way to use them. There are a few things you need to understand to get value from a social bookmarking backlink. This article is going to go over some of those things and hopefully teach you the right way to build backlinks with social bookmarking.

The Do-Follow Attribute

Regardless of anything mentioned in this article this is the most important part. The social bookmarking website cannot use the no-follow attribute in their outbound links. The whole concept of the no-follow attribute is to prevent Pagerank from being passed as well as link value. It has already been stated as recently as June 2009 by Google’s Matt Cutts that no-follow links do not get any value; this includes anchor text\keyword value. Below is a copy of this statement…

“Now let’s talk about the rel=nofollow attribute. No-follow is method (introduced in 2005 and supported by multiple search engines) to annotate a link to tell search engines “I can’t or don’t want to vouch for this link.” In Google, no-follow links don’t pass PageRank and don’t pass anchortext [*].

No-follow links definitely don’t pass PageRank. Over the years, I’ve seen a few corner cases where a no-follow link did pass anchortext, normally due to bugs in indexing that we then fixed. The essential thing you need to know is that no-follow links don’t help sites rank higher in Google’s search results.”

Quotation Source: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/

So, with these above statements we can fully accept that no-follow backlinks have absolutely no value in terms of search engine optimization. With this lesson we understand that the social bookmarking website must not utilize the no-follow attribute in their outbound links.

Tagging to Promote Indexing

One of the big issues with social bookmarking backlinks is they get completely de-indexed from search engine indexes. This is due to the fact of the hundreds of thousands of web pages that social bookmarking websites create and search engines won’t index many of them. This is usually because of the lack of inbound external and internal links to the web page.

We can prevent this by using the tag system properly. Usually most bookmarking sites will have a tag cloud of the most popular tags. You should try to find a tag that is relevant to your site that is displayed normally in this cloud. This helps search engines find your backlink much easier and also promotes a lot of internal linking to your specific bookmark. Without proper use of tagging you’ll find your social bookmarking backlink will get lost in the mix and never be indexed.

Stay Active in the Community

Just like with tagging being active in the community helps get your social bookmarking links indexed. This is because your user id or profile will link back to all your social bookmarks and help search engines find them much easier. It’s a good idea to rate or comment on some of the popular social bookmarks in that community and even contribute in some of their forum communities. You’ll find the most popular social bookmarks are provided by people who are very active in the community.

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