The response to my last article About Social Bookmarking has been amazing. I’ve been getting messages with questions, feedback and sites I missed in the first review.

Thank you for that!

This article goes into more detail about the culture of social bookmarking, some new ideas of its future, how it applies to SEO, and reviews more "don’t miss" social bookmarking sites.

How powerful is social bookmarking? Traffic at 14th Colony is up 50%. I’m getting 380% more traffic from social bookmarking sites than regular search engines.

"Regular" search engines? That’s right! Social bookmarking sites have their own proprietary search engines. While still crude - most rely on Meta data - they are evolving fast.

In fact, new search engines have appeared that are entirely driven by social bookmarking sites!

More Popular Social Bookmark Communities

Reddit - This site definitely has some problems. The layout is sparse. The scoring is confusing; you can vote for your link and it will either get a +1 or a 0 - you never know which! As you add links and people vote on them your "karma" score goes up or down, presumably based on the quality if the links you submit.

Documentation is weak. To figure it out you must click around to see what happens. Be warned, when you vote for a site and hit the up (positive) link twice it turns the vote down (negative). Clicking again puts the vote back up but it bears watching. You’d hate to start your own link in the negative!

I was ready to write Reddit off as a small site that wasn’t worth much consideration as even popular URLs had scores of less than 200.

And then I saw my logs.

Reddit sent more traffic to 14thC in 24 hours than all the other social bookmarking sites combined did in 15 days, including Digg.

The scores from the articles I submitted ranged from -9 to +9. What I get from this is that you can’t use the scores to determine traffic. And URLs are hotly debated (I assume, there is no total votes displayed). The option for comments is there - like many other sites, but almost nobody uses them. This makes determining what works and why very difficult.

At the end I say don’t worry about it, just enjoy the traffic!

Blinklist - Blinklist has Web 2.0 written all over it with a sleek design and amazing features. This is the site I hope makes it to the top. It’s just fun to click around and see what’s next!

Blinklist gives you the option to keep your votes private or to make them public. You can add friends to track their links. And if someone consistently delivers quality links you can become a "fan"!

Blinklist’s search engine is based on tags applied to the submitted URLs. When you search for a keyword, the additional tags applied to those articles appear in a list allowing you to quickly narrow your search.

In addition to "blinking" URLs you may vote on the quality of the URL. Blinking a site just puts it in your list, the votes give it power. Each URL can earn up to 4 stars.

Blinklist also has the option to import del.icio.us, Furl and browser links. This is ingenious as it allows them to literally pull the links from their competition.

Social Bookmarking Cultures and Taboos

When first looking into social bookmarking I assumed that people who were members at one site were also members at others. This is only partially true. Content creators tend to be members at several sites (usually up to 3).

But members that are at a site for the content are usually loyal to just that one site! And that loyalty is fierce. Submitting my original social bookmarking article to sites that were not included in the reviews section was a mistake. It dropped in points or was ignored altogether. Eventually it climbed up slightly but the lesson was clear.

Submitting a story to a site that critiques that site does not go over well. Believe me; I learned this one the hard way. One brave member added a comment asking if the URL submitted was a joke…

The Future of Social Bookmarks

I stand by my predictions in the first article and have a couple more to add. First, social bookmarking sites are direct competitors to traditional search engines. These sites are popular and getting more so daily. Because they have systems of organizing and searching through links they are in effect search engines themselves. As the search technology improves at these sites expect the major search engines to take notice and implement bookmarking programs of their own!

New uses for social bookmarking will be discovered. The latest example is Wink which is a social bookmarking-based search engine! Wink pulls results from del.icio.us, Digg and Furl.

I’ve even seen a couple new social bookmarking scraper sites! These sites pull results from social bookmarking sites and are stacked with Adwords ads. Behold; the new spammer!

Social Bookmarking is SEO

As mentioned in the introduction, most social bookmarking sites have their own search engines. As these sites get larger databases, ranking well in their proprietary search engines will become more important. As these sites are already attracting and delivering, large amounts of targeted traffic getting an understanding of how these search engines work is essential to the modern SEO.

Each site has its own ranking factors. These factors usually include the amount of total votes. Some sites include an additional ranking score like Blinklist. And some sites use an aggregate score like Reddit. Technorati includes backlinks. Most sites include the tags applied to the links. Finally, the title and comments may also be factors.

These sites don’t use onpage factors, but I suspect they will as more complex systems of spam detection and better algorithms are used to rank the URLs.

Limitations of Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking is a target for spam. Most sites have put the burden of detecting these links on the members but as competition increases and customer service becomes more important watch for new methods of detecting this.

The search engines themselves can be easily gamed by adding high-traffic terms that may not be relevant to the actual page content. At some point, these sites will have to apply onpage factors to their relevance scores to combat these problems.

Another problem social bookmarking faces is a clear set of standards. This isn’t likely to change as competition and budget factors will outweigh the need for these sites to work together. Just because you understand one site, don’t think the others are the same. Sometimes differences are small, sometimes they are drastic. Pay attention so you don’t accidentally sink your URL or your reputation.

Social bookmarking sites are dependant on members submitting links. I’m not sure this will last as database size becomes a competitive factor. I would not be surprised to find out social bookmarking sites transition to using spidering technology.

More Tips for Social Bookmarks

Use relevant tags when submitting a URL. This will ensure you get targeted traffic to your site and the best conversions.

Topical and news stories are the most popular. The diehard social bookmarkers are looking for constant updates and they may vote for hundreds of sites within a single day.

"How to" sites also do well. Some things about the Internet don’t change. The quest for knowledge is pretty universal online. Most of the sites that do well in the "how to" category have a technical focus, usually involving some type of programming.

"History of" sites are also popular. Authority articles that are comprehensive and a one stop shop for that topic is of great interest to social bookmarkers.

Conclusion

Social bookmarking is here to stay. As databases increase in size and proprietary search engines get more complex these sites will start delivering better search results.

Competition will drive and divide these sites into tighter categories. As this occurs the level of competition with the major search engines will increase.

Savvy search engine optimizers will see social networking as another form of SEO and jump in now to learn what works.