Bookmarking pros and cons

It's easy to either dismiss or overlook social bookmarking as a necessary part of your online marketing, but the fact of the matter is that search engines pay a lot of attention to these sites. None of the bookmarking sites have rules against bookmarking your own blog or website, which means that you're free to bookmark your own URLs so others can discover them. This can be important because they can drive traffic to your blog or website. Improve its SEO, or search engine optimization, speed up page indexing by the search engines, increase the reach of your content, help you discover content that you might want to curate, and provide new ideas for things like blog posts.

As with the most things online, there can be disadvantages to social bookmarking as well, especially if you rely on them as your main source of building traffic. Sometimes, the quality of the traffic drawing to your site from social bookmarking is low because the people drawn to it stay only briefly then leave. Since what you've posted might not be exactly what they're looking for. It's not uncommon for a link to make it to the front page of a social bookmarking site, that results in thousands of visitors to your site, which ends in a server crash that makes it inaccessible to your high-quality visitors.

Another disadvantage is, some social bookmarking sites tag all of their stored and shared links with a nofollow tag that tells the search engines not to include the links in their search results. This degrades the value of any link that you might have there. Of the five major bookmarking sites that we'll look at in this course, only Stumbleupon does this.