50+ Social Bookmarking Sites : Importance of User Generated Tags, Votes and Links

The positive effects of social bookmarking for publishers of news sites, blogs, and other web sites is outstanding. Social bookmarking can introduce sites to others with relevant tastes, drive traffic to your site, and valuable backlinks.

Some social bookmark sites like Propeller.com pass on link juice, while some use the NoFollow attribute. But do not let the use of NoFollow fool you, the search engines are looking beyond the incoming links from social bookmarking sites to gauge their value to their search indexes. The external metadata compiled via user generated descriptions, tags, titles and categorization is incredibly valued by the search engines, as in the same philosophy as anchored backlinks, descriptive content about a web site defined by the users of that site who are not associated with the marketing or coding of that site, can be extremely powerful in gauging the importance and relevance of the content and tags which are used on that site.

Bookmarks show how a site is perceived, and when these sites allow voting, they also show the engines or whatever classification system which monitors voting, how people feel about the quality of the site. Furthermore, social bookmarking can introduce a site to the search engines, as in some cases, people may find and bookmark a site or a site’s internal pages before a search engine can find those pages via another form of inbound link.

Monitoring social bookmarking services like Delicious and StumbleUpon help search engines in multiple ways by:

• Indexing Sites Faster : Humans bookmark sites launched by their friends or colleagues before a search engine bot can find them.
• Deeper Indexing : Many pages bookmarked are deep into sites and sometimes not as easily linked to by others, found via bad or nonexistent site navigation or linked to from external pages.
• Measuring Quality : Essentially if more users bookmark a page, the more quality and relevance that site has. A site with multiple bookmarks across multiple bookmarking services by multiple users is much more of an authority than a site with only several bookmarks by the same user.
• External Meta Data : Users who bookmark sites tag them with keywords and descriptions which add an honest and unbiased definition which is created by the public and not the owner of the site.
• Co Citation : Social bookmarking sites tend to categorize sites and pages based upon the tags used by humans to describe the site; therefore search algorithms can classify these sites with their peers.
• Number of Votes : Similar to the number of bookmarks, the more votes a page receives on Digg or Reddit, the more useful that information usually is. If the same page receives multiple votes across multiple social news voting sites, the higher quality the site.
• Categorization : Like Co Citation, categorization can help define the subject of a site, therefore better helping the engine address searcher intent.

To help share the wealth of social bookmarking, I’ve put together a list of 125 social bookmarking sites, some of which are very popular and others which are newer or somewhat unheard of. But besides targeting the major social bookmarking sites, you will find some diamonds in the rough which are niche oriented or treated well by Google and other search engines.

50+ Social Bookmarking/News Sites You Should Consider

• BibSonomy :BibSonomy is run by the Knowledge Data Engineering Group of the University of Kassel, Germany. Its specifically designed for researchers, in sharing bookmarks and bibliographies
• Blinklist :A social bookmarking site launched by Mindvalley. According to their site, they launch several web businesses a year and are focused in 3 areas. – Technology, media and Marketing. BlinkList does have a user friendly interface indicating that its being run well and efficiently. They also quote “fully profitable” on their site. Furthermore, you can label and comment about any web page on the Internet.
• BlogBookMark : Designed specifically for Blog hunters, BlogBookmark.com claims to have the hottest news, gossip, and blog chatter from around the web. I highly sugggest that mainstream bloggers bookmark their entire sites here.
• blurpalicious : Get Blurped! Not too different from other social bookmarks, but I love the tagline.
• Bmaccess : Social bookmarking with thumbs :).
• Bookmark-manager : Organizer for bookmarks, calendar, diary and knowledge.
• Bookmax : You can store your bookmarks and links to your favorite sites online and access them from wherever you are : basic Social Bookmarking.
• Buddymarks : The online personal, group and social bookmarks manager.
• Citeulike : A free service to help academics to share, store, and organise the academic papers they are reading.
• Clipclip : Clipclip allows you to save images and text, with a “bookmarklet”.
• Cloudytags : A unique word analyzer connects to your page, gets all the words and suggest you the real tags your site is showing to the world.
• de.lirio.us : Store, share and tag your favourite links. Open source clone of delicious with private bookmarking, tagging, blogging, and notes
• delicious : THE social bookmarking site : It allows you to easily add sites you like to your personal collection of links and to categorize those sites with keywords. Not to mention that if enough people save your site in a bookmark, it will make their popular page and send a lot of traffic. Delicious is owned by Yahoo and is a MUST for your social media and bookmarking strategy.
• Diigo : Social bookmarking on steroids.
• Digg : The social news site that changed the Internet, Digg is a high power authority and a listing in Digg for a site, even if it only has a couple of votes, will rank highly on Google and other search engines for certain terms. If your site is shared and voted upon on Digg, and makes the Digg homepage, you’ll get a lot of traffic and attention from other bloggers who read Digg.
• Dropjack : DropJack.com is a social content website and owned by the ExactSeek company.
• Easybm : Allows users to bookmark their frequently visited sites on their private page, allowing 1-click access to their favorite web sites.
• ez4u : Social Bookmarking – Ez4u to Bookmark : “Ez4u to Organize Ez4u to Share with Others Ez4u to Remember”
• Favoor : Favoor is your personalized new start page. Collect your favorite internet addresses.
• Folkd : Folkd is a social web-service about pages, news, audios, videos and blogs.
• Freelink : Freelink.org provides free pages of links that you can access anywhere at anytime.
• Furl : Like Delicious, LookSmart’s Furl.net is one of the first social bookmarking sites and considered an authority by the major search engines. Listing your sites in Furl will lead to traffic from organic rankings and its popular page drives traffic.
• Gather : Gather is a place to contribute articles and content, blog, tag and connect with people who share your passions. (Plus you can link out from the articles in this authority site).
• Google : Allows users to save and create bookmarks in their Google toolbar that can be accessed anywhere online. Google is getting more social by the day, so take advantage of their Google Bookamrks and citations, because one day they probably will have some kind of influence on external meta data considered by the Google ranking algortihm.
• Hyperlinkomatic : This is a bookmark list manager.
• i89.us : i89.us offers a free service which allows you to save your favorite website/links at one location that can be accessed from anywhere.
• Icio : Danish bookmarking engine.
• Ikeepbookmarks : Popup feature allows you to add links while surfing the web
• Iloggo : Simple web based bookmarking tool that you can use for attractively displaying your favorite websites on one page.
• Kaboodle : Kaboodle is a 2.0 shopping community where people recommend and discover new things.
• Kinja : Kinja is a blog guide, collecting news and commentary from some of the best sites on the web.
• Lilsto : Lilisto lets you store, manage and find your favorite links (or bookmarks) and removes the need to maintain them through your browser.
• Linkagogo : Favorites and Social Bookmarking Application, its unique dynamic toolbars automatically adapt themselves.
• Linkarena : German Social Bookmarking site.
• Markaboo : MarkaBoo is tool for saving websites, files, and notes from your browser, email or mobile phone.
• Memotoo :Lets users centralize and share your personal data.
• Mister Wong : Mister Wong is a social bookmarking site that originated in Germany, and has since become a popular and widespread tool.
• Murl : My URLs is a free online bookmarks manager, think of it as a bookmarks community.
• MyBookmarks : MyBookmarks – access your bookmarks anytime, anywhere. Free productivity tool for business, student or personal use. Another popular bookmarking site.
• Myhq : Store your bookmarks in one central location. Fast, text-based, banner free!
• MyLife : A social search engine where users can find others
• mySiteVote : mySiteVote is a community where you can vote your favorite site/s and view how popular a site is.
• MyWebDesktop : A collaboration and communication tool, designed to be as generic and easy to use as a telephone and email.
• Newsvine : The mission of Newsvine is to bring together big and little media in a way which respects established journalism. .
• Reddit : Timely and shocking news oriented, Reddit stories are instantly voted upon and if liked by the community as a whole, can drive incredible traffic and users.
• Segnalo : Italian Social bookmarking site.
• Sitebar : A solution for people who use multiple browsers or computers and want to have their bookmarks available from anywhere without need to synchronize them
• Sitejot :Free online bookmark manager. Like every other social bookmarking site, it allows users to manage all of their bookmarks online in one convenient place.
• Slashdot : The godfather of social news, SlashDot bookmarks are still quite powerful .. keep in mind the site has a heavy slant towards Linux and Open Source issues.
• Squidoo :Kind of spammed out, Squidoo is a 2.0 property which lets people and businesses set up a ‘lens’ which lists links, tags and relevant RSS feeds to different subjects.
• Startaid : I’ve noticed that StartAid bookmark pages rank highly in Google and other search engines. This basic bookmarking service allows users to describe, tag and categorize sites.
• StumbleUpon: Owned by eBay, StumbleUpon is an amazing blend of social bookmarking, voting, networking, web surfing, search and blogging. Best of all, StumbleUpon can send major traffic with its userbase of around 3 million users.
• Stylehive : The Stylehive is a collection of all the best products, brands, designers and stores discovered and tagged by the Hive community.
• Tagza : A very young Social Bookmarking site mostly being used by Indian and Pakistani web masters.
• Whitelinks : Securely store and quickly access favorite websites whenever connected to the Internet,
• Wirefan : Social bookmarking, news articles submission site.
• Xilinus : Organize and manage bookmarks online.
• Yahoo! Bookmarks : Easily one of the most popular social search and bookmarking service on the web. It’s similar to Delicious and something they launched before acquiring Delicious. Yahoo Bookmarks lets users store bookmarks using their Yahoo Toolbar and access them from any computer.

Do you have any suggestions of other social bookmarking sites? Please feel free to add them in the comments below.