Social bookmarking articles and webpages does really bring and increase traffic, but there is a big word of caution in using social bookmarking excessively. Search engines are very powerful that they have algorithms to check how many social bookmark links are pointing to your overall site, through how many accounts and also the number of other links other than social bookmarks (like comments in a bookmark). They also check if the accounts being used to bookmark your article are not just pointing to one or two sites.

Like blog comment spam, social bookmark spam is a huge problem. We know that the maximum traffic to an article or  website comes through search engines and not through social bookmarks. The last thing you want to do is to compromise your standing with search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. Therefore,  using social bookmarking in moderation is fine but there is marking when self-bookmarking will exceed the redline of search engines. It is best to get links pointing back to the article from multiple sources like discussion forums, other articles, bookmarks and directories.

You should give an option to your readers to social bookmark your articles using their own accounts. This will help getting links from several different accounts, but you will not be punished because those accounts point to many other sites as well. You will likely get links from different parts of the world and it will likely not harm your article or site in any way. Traffic from social bookmarks anyway tends to die out in a couple of weeks anyway but traffic coming through search engines keep coming for a long time.

There is no way to judge what exactly other people do in Social Bookmarking sites, but trying shortcuts just to get more traffic will surely never works. It’s best to write good content and the web traffic will naturally flow your way.