If you expect your content to go viral or at least get the traffic you want without doing anything apart from pressing the ‘Publish’ button, you’re wrong. There are many ways to help people find your content – social media is the preferred method, but bookmarking is still useful, if used correctly.
When it comes to content promotion, not only must you use a variety of channels, you need to have a strategy. As part of your strategy, as well as your promotional arsenal, social bookmarking sites should not be overlooked. For sure, you still need to engage on social media, as well as have a rigorous outreach strategy, but social bookmarking sites are still an effective way of putting your content in front of the people who are interested in your industry, products and services. Therefore, these should be implemented into your SEO and content promotion strategy.
Whilst times have changed and bookmarking is no longer considered a link building practice on a massive scale, there are still a lot of benefits this can generate for your website. These can include:
However, given Google’s recent algorithm updates I believe you need to have a strategy when it comes to social bookmarking to avoid any pitfalls, or even worse, receiving a penalty from Google.
According to Google’s latest quality guidelines, links coming from low-quality directories and bookmarking sites can be seen us unnatural and therefore could have a negative effect on your rankings.
Years ago, social bookmarking was pretty much about getting your content bookmarked on every site, no matter the quality, out there in order to generate as many links as possible. Well, these days are gone so if you’re still doing it, STOP now!
The correct way to use social bookmarking and content curation sites is to use them on a regular basis. You need to be active, grow your followers (if possible) and most importantly engage with the audience, otherwise you won’t get the results you want and you can actually put your website at greater risk.
I would highly recommend applying the Pareto 80/20 rule where 80% of the content you bookmark/curate/submit is not from your website, but still relevant to your industry. The rest (20%) of submitted or shared articles should be from your website or blog.
It’s time to take your content beyond the usual social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. I’ve created a list of top social bookmarking sites which I have a good experience with and use on a regular basis.
Pearltrees is one of my favourite bookmarking sites as it’s very powerful and an easy-to-use platform. I use it as my number one personal bookmarking site and have already seen good results in terms of traffic, as well as likes within the platform itself. Below you can see how I structure the content I share.
StumbleUpon is a must-use site not only for those who want to share their articles, but also for people who want to find interesting articles, hence the nickname ‘discovery engine’. It can be a powerful traffic driver for many businesses, big as well as small. With a wide range of categories to choose from, you’ll be able to show your content to a relevant audience.
Delicious is a very effective bookmarking site that enables you to easily bookmark sites you like and create personal collections based on tags/keywords. As a bonus, all of your bookmarks can be shown in a feed allowing others to follow/subscribe to your bookmarks.
Digg together with Delicious are top bookmarking sites with a high authority. If your website/content is shared and voted up and makes the Digg Home page you can expect a lot of traffic.
The main pros and cons are similar to Delicious, so don’t expect much from your first submission.
Flipboard claims to be social magazine which collects news and other content and presents it in magazine-style format. With Flipboard you can create your own magazine on any topic you like. This way you can create visually appealing magazines on topics relevant to your industry and audience.
This SteamFeed article will show you how to use Flipboard to promote your business.
BizSugar is one of my favourite curation sites which I use on a regular basis. As the name suggest, BizSugar is a social bookmarking sites made for small and medium sized business to share useful content. If it’s good users can reward it with ‘sugars’ (votes); the more you get, the better. Plus your submitted content can become ‘hot’ and make the first page. Below is an example of one of my SEO posts that became hot, resulting in a traffic increase as well as additional comments:
Sharebloc is a very similar to BizSugar where you can curate useful content and get votes. It’s a quite new platform, but it has great potential to grow.
Bundlr is another site which is fairly new on the block. I’ve only explored it recently, however it’s a very simple and easy to use platform allowing you to add content about your favourite topics, photos, videos and more.
If done correctly social bookmarking can be still a very effective tactic at driving traffic in today’s post-Penguin world. However, don’t forget that relevancy and regular activity is the key.
How about you?
What experience do you have with social bookmarking? What other social bookmarking and content curation sites do you find useful and effective in the post-penguin era? I would love to hear your suggestions and thoughts.
If you’d like to know more, be sure to check out our content marketing services or contact our friendly sales team today.
Image Credits
Social Bookmarking from BigStock Photo
nice information about social bookmarking ,keep shearing this type of information
Thank you for your comment!
What other social bookmarking and content curation sites do you find useful and effective in the post-penguin era? I would love to hear your suggestions and thoughts.
Great article…Useful information about the sites…
It is very useful post. Thank you for sharing it.
Thank you, I have used all of your suggested social bookmarking as above.
Great blog on how do we use social bookmarking sites to improve the traffic.The sites mentioned here will be useful for increasing organic search.
Thank you very much for sharing it’s very useful article and hope to read more about your experience.
it’s a unique and detailed information of social bookmarking sites.. i haven’t seen any site on internet providing such pros and cons on related topic..
kudos..
Excellent post. Social bookmarking plays an important role in improving your website rank and traffic, Thanks for sharing such a great post.
Good Information , Keep up the good work
I have read your post really very interesting thanks for sharing post with us
Good list to start with. Thanks for sharing…
Hi Lenka,
Thanks for providing the list of high pr social bookmarking sites list with useful information
keep up the good work
That’s a very helpful list, just used it! Thanks :)
great site. thanks for post site
Great tips for link building. Social bookmarking is the great link building ideas.
This article help me to know about these social bookmarking site.
the article has lots of information on SEO tips, thanks Lenka Istvanova
Good Article
Nice listings.Thank you
This Article is very useful for SEO Analyst, Thanks to share
Thank you for the valuable information
thank you…
nice post thanks for sharing
thank you for sharing awesome article
Hey Lenka,
Thanks for sharing this list. The site listed are really helpful.
Thanks for giving valuable information.
Great Post ,Thank you for sharing such a useful social bookmarking sites list.
Great list of recommendation.
Thanks for the sharing these nice sites. My fav is bizsugar :-)
Keep Sharing.
One bookmarking site I don’t see on this list is Poolit (https://poolit.me/betaregister). Here are the main benefits I’ve noticed from this simple and dynamic bookmarking tool:
– Saves links to personally made categories
– Visually browse all saved links on one page
– Invite other people to save links into categories
– Keep notes directly on the pages you save
Thanks! Nice list, It is very helpful for me.
Did you say Digg?? Digg is no more a social bookmarking site. Look at the site. It has become another social media content publishers. Almost 2 years back they just reformed Digg with new looks and new rules and everything has changed there.
Instead of Digg, you could mention Diigo. This is quite a good bookmarking site and has been very stable for years.
Thank you for the list of social bookmarking sites. I will try to submit to them my links and hope it will work. :)
Never know about pearltrees.com before.
But I just signup and love it very much.
Easy to use and I can “save” anything I like.
Thank you for sharing the information.
Thank you Lenka! it really helped me a lot :) keep it up!
though pearltree is interesting in design but i dont see it helpful in building traffic
It’s a great tool for organizing your bookmarks . thanks for sharing.
Hi Lenka,
Thank you for sharing this. Would you recommend any tool to submite my bookmark to muliple website at once?
Thank you so much Lenka, I was really looking for such types of social sharing sites that make sense now a days.
Thanks for such an informative article. I have used most of it but was unaware of the websites like Sharebloc, Bundlr, and Flipboard. Thanks for letting me know about these websites.
I’d like to suggest Start.me as well. It’s a great tool for organizing your bookmarks.
I use “Digg” but submitting URL it show it submitted. How Digg Give us a traffic like you said on above post. I never see in my Google analytic that some traffic comes from “Digg”. Am i doing in a wrong way?
Hey
Thanks for great share. Am actually confused because as i have in my knowledge Google does not appreciate the same content on many websites and if we are sharing the same article on Social bookmarking sites it may cause penalty.
So what should be strategy then? I think if you blog quality content on regular basis your ranking can be boost up.
I only use FaceBook, Google+, Twitter and Pinterest to share my content.
I’ll appreciate the advice in this regard please?
Scoop-it is also one great curation site I use and the best part is you can suggest content to power curator.
Like biggie I use Scoop.it every day and find it drives regular traffic to my site
I think Reddit should be in that list. What’s your opinion?
Informative article to know how to bookmark your Web page on high traffic Social bookmarking sites. Stumble Upon is one of my most favorite one to get more traffic on an informative URL.
Thanks Alex, glad you found it useful. Same here, StumbleUpon is great.
Thanks for the shout-out. We’re still very early (as rightly pointed out) but I think we’ve been growing pretty quickly for a 3-month old startup. Thank you for being a valued user and curator!
No problem, David. I really like ShareBloc and have seen some great results already.
Good luck in the future.
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