One of the most over used yet under appreciated tools in a webmaster’s toolkit now is social bookmarking. It has been an increasingly important role in the search engine optimization and traffic generation of webmasters for the past year or two yet the question I want to pose is, why is it so abused?
There are some truly excellent pages that I stumble upon when I am bored, and Digg is always great to catch up on the recent quirks of our society but more and more these are simply filled with spam. As a user of social bookmarking and social networking sites I must say that the uptick in spam is noticable. More and more absolutely useless websites are making their way into social bookmarking sites due to firms that are willing to professionally social bookmark a site. I have no problem with this, I have a problem with the fact that it is the low quality sites that are typically paying for such services.
One thing to ask yourself as a webmaster whether it be for your regular readers, subscribers, or social bookmarking traffic is: “How useful is my content to those visiting my site?”. As long as the content is useful to visitors, nobody really cares where the traffic comes from or how they got it. The thing that irks me is when I go on StumbleUpon and the following are my 4 stumbles in a row: bux.to referral page (this is a paid to read site and a poor one at that), a review of the rich jerk, a review of another affiliate marketing guide, and google.com. The first three are all clearly people that are trying to jocky for a few affiliate commissions but in reality social bookmarking traffic rarely converts, so they are wasting bandwidth. As with Google.com, who does not know what Google is?
The challenge I pose to my fellow webmasters is that as a collective we need to be more cautious in the way that we use social bookmarking. I have nothing against using the system to generate traffic for your sites or my own for that matter, I just wish that we cleaned up the affiliate spam so that it doesn’t reflect poorly on all marketers.
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