SEO & Articles & Resources & Social Bookmarks 31 Jan 2007 03:18 pm
Role of social bookmarking in SEO
Social bookmarking has complicated the life of SEO professionals while increasing the relevance of what an Internet search ultimately finds. It may be said that social bookmarking has made SEO more human through sheer lack of control over the content or its form. Websites offering social bookmaking are quite popular as they allow users to store, share, and search for information on folksonomy techniques.
Folksonomy implies that the main users of the content are the authors among themselves. This makes the content more organic and helps to develop a chain of similar content so that social bookmarking becomes relevant when one user or group can easily find other users or groups through a common content base.
Social bookmarking is also challenging because folksonomy, by default, rejects the search engine mindset that SEO experts were hitherto used to. Social bookmarking, through folksonomy, does away with the basic WWW protocols that form the rules for SEO.
Social bookmarking is not just related to web pages but it can also link directly to RSS feeds, music, video, eBooks, shopping items, map locations, and so on. There is practically no restriction on what may turn up through a social bookmarking search.
Though exciting, the concept is not entirely new and can be traced back to April 1996 and the launch of itList.com It took only 3 years for the field to get intensely competitive and only the dot-com fiasco put it in the back rows for a short while. Social bookmarking made a comeback with the emergence of blogging and websites such as del.icio.us, Digg, and reddit.
A social bookmarking system is nothing more than a list of Internet resources that anyone finds useful and shares this list with others. Sharing may be over a closed network, with custom privacy settings, or open to anyone on the Internet. Other users typically conduct a search for matching interests based on category and tags.
Categorization is crucial to social bookmarking due to the diverse nature of content. Most services permit users to search using assigned “tags”. The rank enjoyed by a resource depends on the number of users that have bookmarked it, and not the content of the resource itself.
While originally social bookmarking was only about sharing bookmarks, competition and other factors have forced growth into commenting, rating, import and export, reviews, email links, automatic notification, RSS feeds, web annotations and so forth.
RSS feeds are especially popular with users because it permits them to use “tags” to establish preferences and avoiding manual checking for resource updates. The RSS feed automatically provides information on any updates that take place.
From a search perspective, social bookmarking is good because humans do everything and that implies a natural ability to understand the content. There is no spider or crawler determining content validity or relevance to jumble search results. This means that the tags used are semantically classified, something that cannot be achieved with search engine keywords.
The trouble is that there is no standard, no keywords, no tag structure, and what is more, users often implement their own tag schemas leading to infinite standards.
Users have already started abusing this system by combining it with SEO to increase web visibility. More tags from a web page get it a higher rank and this is easily exploited to falsely get a higher ranking.
Article By: Manish Mathukiya, Who offer SEO Services and Manual website directory submission services.





