SeoAlchemist

Social bookmarking allows web users to search, share, organize, and store the bookmarks of different web pages. This can be done publicly or privately (in private groups), or a combination of the two. People who are allowed to view the bookmarks can view them using a variety of different functions to sort and tag them.

Most of the services that provide social bookmarking encourage you to organize bookmarks with informal tags. They allow bookmarks to be viewed with their associations to the tag, including information on the users that bookmarked those sites. Some services will even have RSS feeds for their lists, and you will be alerted when new bookmarks are shared, tagged, or saved.

The tagging and descriptions used in bookmarking is referred to as external meta data and can have huge benefits in SEO, because the information used in the tagging is not controlled by the site owners, but by the public. In essence, the information in external meta tags should be much more valuable than external inbound link anchor text or directory co citation. Especially if there are hundreds or thousands of users tagging these sites.

NoFollow is a non-standard HTML attribute value which is used to police the outbound link value of user generated content, especially blog commenting. NoFollow is used to communicate with search engines to tell them that a link should not be used to pass on link juice, or “PageRank”.

The idea is that it will help reduce people who spam links, making sure that search engines get better results when keywords are searched, and many social bookmarking sites havee implemented this strategy. However, there are social bookmarking sites that do not use nofollow in their HTML tags, and this is important for you to understand when you are developing your social SEO strategies.

Social Bookmarking Sites Which Don’t Use NoFollow

1. Listible is a newer social bookmarking site, and it is very random. You can start a list about anything from TV theme songs to Firefox extensions. Users can then rate items and leave their comments.
2. Furl, one of the services offered by LookSmart, allows you to copy web pages and then save, search, and share them. This social bookmarking site is great for everything from job searches to research papers to shopping lists. You can access Furl from any computer, and your favorites are always accessible.
3. Yahoo My Web 2.0 Beta is a social search engine, meaning that people and the search engine technology work in harmony to create the optimum search experience. You can browse by keyword or search out interesting subjects. It offers you a way to bookmark and network simultaneously.
4. Propeller is a hybrid of social bookmarking and social news sharing, with a voting system like Digg and hot stories, but it’s also owned by AOL, uses organic links in its stories, and also includes bookmark style tagging.
5. Flickr gives social bookmarking a different spin – the site is all about photos. You can upload and tag your favorites, and then other users can bookmark them and share them with their friends. You can even leave comments as to why you like or do not like a particular image. Flickr lets its users place an HTML link in their photo descriptions - perfect for high rankings and relevant link juice.
6. Digg.com can get a little crazy and confusing, since it is open for anyone to post sites and leave comments. The users of Digg.com are not shy about telling the world how they feel about different sites (especially if your story or ‘bookmark’ makes the homepage after receiving enough votes), and most of the posts are featured around technology items.
7. Technorati Faves is a great place to bookmark sites on an authority social site without having the use of NoFollow cast a shadow on your links.
8. Slashdot is the original when it comes to social bookmarking sites. Slashdot offers both personal bookmarks and summaries of stories which may or may not be approved to make it to the homepage. Users can submit links and stories and have other users leave comments. Submissions do have to be pre-approved, which is a downside for some users.
9. Searchles is a social bookmarking oriented search engine with tagging, video upload, groups and voting. It’s also run by a search company, DumbFind, so they’ve made it extra search engine friendly.

Know of any more social bookmarking sites which don’t use NoFollow? Add some in the comments at the end of this post. (more…)