The Advantages and Disadvantages of Social Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking sites have become a favourite with bloggers these days. If you are thinking that social media doesn’t have the same reach it had previously, think again. Social Bookmarking drives the traffic to the blogs when users on different social media sites share interesting videos and posts with their friends.

Before we get into the advantages and disadvantages of Social Bookmarking, we need to understand what Social Bookmarking is.

What is Social Bookmarking?

Social Bookmarking is nothing but an online portal that enables users to share, add, and edit different web documents. Every individual spends a large portion of their day online and when you read something interesting that you want to share with your friends and family, you bookmark it and save it online. It’s as simple as adding a bookmark to a book. Social Bookmarking allows the user to return to the page later and access it from different sources since it is available online.

With Social Bookmarking, you save the webpage online instead of copying the URL in a notepad or document. Social Bookmarking also helps the user to organize the best content that they come across on the web in one particular area, so that it is easily accessible.

After the know-how on Social Bookmarking, we need to understand the different advantages of the same. Social Bookmarking is highly popular these days.

Advantages of Social Bookmarking

Helps You Go Viral

You might have used a lot of codes to increase the SEO of your blog. While some may find success in this technique, there is a lot that you often lose out on. This is where Social Bookmarking comes in. When you make post a link of your blog post as a bookmark on different Social Bookmarking sites, the users will automatically be redirected to your blog when they view the same. Once you interest the new visitors with your blog, they will automatically bookmark your posts on different social media sites. Thanks to a large number of backlinks, you will get more traffic. However, make sure that your content is interesting and unique or else you will not be able to attract new visitors.

Increase Traffic

Once your blog goes viral on social media thanks to Social Bookmarking, you will see an increase in traffic. Make sure that you don’t stop at posting your bookmarks on one site. Post on multiple sites to increase the inflow of traffic. Post on Social Bookmarking sites like Google+, Reddit, Technorati, Delicious and Digg. Posting on these sites are free, so you don’t have to spend any money. Once these Social Bookmarking sites contribute to your blog traffic, view the analytics of your page and determine which of these sites contribute more than the others. You can tweak your bookmarking accordingly.

Build Your Brand

With Social Bookmarking, you get targeted traffic. When you get the targeted customers, you automatically help your brand grow. Once the new users find your blog appealing, they will subscribe to it. Social Bookmarking sites often allow users to review the different sites. Depending on user preference, some posts are buried while some get more coverage. When you are one of the most preferred sites, you automatically build trust and new users show interest in getting a better idea about your brand.

Improve SERPs

 Social Bookmarking is a convenient way to build one-way links. Bookmarking sites have a positive impact on the ranking of the bookmarked sites. They eventually improve the PageRank and SERPs of the sites. Since Google is planning to make SEO social, Social Bookmarking is a convenient way to improve search engine ranking.

Like everything in life, all good things come with their own disadvantages and problems and similar is the case with Social Bookmarking.

Disadvantages of Social Bookmarking

SEO

While bookmarking can help you with your SEO and SERPs, it can also create a lot of subsequent problems. There are multiple sites that will use your bookmarks to create backlinks for their website, without generating any new content. These bogus websites will simply add junk and hope your bookmarks help them to improve their ranking.

Tag Structure

Since Social Bookmarking is still a new concept, there isn’t a lot of information on the same. There isn’t any formal way to regulate how the different Social Bookmarking sites tag the different links. This gives rise to discrepancies that might often create problems. Since it’s individuals who tag these bookmarks, there’s the possibility of human error as well. Such errors create problem inconsistency and organization.

Collusion

Scammers are everywhere on social media. There can be scammers who get a large group of people to submit bookmarks and control their votes. They can trick other users into thinking that this highly bookmarked content is worth seeing and trick them to visit pages that might set free a virus or force them to make a payment.

Spamming

Since individuals have the freedom to create their own tags and bookmark contents, there is a high risk of spamming. This is the problem has further increased since individuals view bookmarked content from people they aren’t connected to. Spamming can also prevent the user from finding the actual website or page.

Conclusion

Social Bookmarking has both its advantages and disadvantages. There are two sides to a coin and like everything, if you are using Social Bookmarking, you have to weigh the odds and go ahead. If you keep aside the disadvantages, you will realize that the advantages are crucial and they can help you to a great extent. The competition to improve page ranking is getting tougher with every passing day. It is easy to make blog posts online and there are over millions of such blogs. If you want to stand apart and expand the number of visitors, you have to do something unique and since Social Bookmarking is still a new concept, it is the best option.

How does social bookmarking help you? Do let us know in the comments below. 

AboutAnita Sharma

Anita Sharma is a Digital Marketing Strategist based in Kolkata, India. Anita covers SEO, SMM, E-commerce and Content marketing. A Marketer by day and reader by night is a graduate of the University of Calcutta with a degree in chemistry; she previously worked as a Tutor for 5+ years. Anita has a passion for helping people in all aspects of Digital Marketing through the latest industry blogs she provides. She is always up for consultations. Want her to plan and execute your Online Marketing Campaign? Contact her via her LinkedIn.