Social Bookmarking is a staple of affordable SEO, and ‘easy win’ linking in general for a really long time. Google’s E.A.T. push of late has made many SEO experts question the effectiveness of social bookmarking in link building for Google ranking? More than 3.5 billion searches are made per day on Google!
In a recent Webmaster Hangouts, Google’s John Mueller seems to have finally emphasized the low-quality link building nature of social bookmarking.
There used to blog comment spam and forum link spam ruling as the twin kings of low-quality link building. Default ‘nofollow’ tags and Google algorithm updates slowly put these two out to pasture (many ‘SEO experts‘ continue to use these tactics today nevertheless).
Social bookmarking rose as an ‘heir’ to these tired SEO tactics of late.
Why does Google think social bookmarking is a low-quality tactic?
Mueller has already explained about there being no “authority” rating. However, your website/article/ page can get multiple links from ‘relevant’ (this is important) websites, for the approximate topic/keyword and become authoritative for a topic.
So, what is wrong with social bookmarking websites?
In one word, irrelevancy. Is your web page on ‘cheap SEO’ getting a link or two from a page dealing with ‘cheap SEO’ topic on that great social bookmarking website? In most cases, this is not true. Most of the time, you will find a rehashed profile about your business and a link inserted somewhere, no matter what link has a great ‘anchor text’. It seems all very spamming, to be honest, even you would admit.
Irrelevant link from an irrelevant page. In other words, a low-quality link.
In this Webmaster video chat, Google’s John Mueller says this about using social bookmarking sites for link building:
“I don’t think those pages would have any effect on your ranking because probably we’re also ignoring those social bookmark sites, the links from there.
That’s a really, really old SEO strategy and we have a lot of practice in recognizing those kinds of links and just ignoring them.”
So. you see. Google ignores social-bookmarking links!
About the author
My name is Taru Malik. I work on SEO & marketing projects at NetMaxims. We have been doing SEO projects since 2001.
The post Why cheap SEO services are useless, part 1: Google’s John Mueller says social bookmarking are generally useless appeared first on Netmaxims.
