The number of social bookmarking sites that have not gone the no follow route is slowly declining with Flickr the latest to join the no follow list. The seems to be an unhealthy interest in whether or not sites, social bookmarking sites included, use the follow or no follow tags. It seems that everyone is looking for rank juice rather than publishing for a audience.
Don’t get me wrong. Link building is important and if you can get inbound links with no follow tags then your ranking is going to be marginally affected. However when it comes to social bookmarking sites then is more value in what other are saying about your pages than a simple no follow link.
If your articles are bookmarked in a variety of social bookmarking sites then the search engines are going to notice you far quicker than by a simple spider crawl. If your article or page has been bookmarked by many then articles ranking climbs. Add to this the tags that are added to your page when it is bookmarked and the area of relevance is broadened. If I bookmarked this article with ‘social bookmarking’ tags then that is one area. You come along and like this article and bookmark it but the tags you use are SEO and Linking. The article now has three points of reference. Each point of reference is reinforced every time someone bookmarks the page.
Whether or not the links have a follow or no follow tag, the search engines will still find the page within the social bookmarking sites and still reference them. I have had pages published, submitted to a site and been indexed by Google within two hours – the index is to one of the bookmarking sites, but that link still leads eventually to my page.
If you really want a social bookmarking site that does not use the no follow then check the following. From what I can see they don’t use the tag, however things are changing almost daily.
Good blog post. I agree. These are all sites that don’t nofollow. I suspect Digg will change its policy soon. I think some of the smaller sites don’t use the nofollow either, but I haven’t identified which ones just yet.
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I don’t over stress the dofollow / nofollow thing. Yeah, I try to get a dofollow when ever I can, but I don’t avoid nofollows. People think nofollows are like a block for bots, but they aren’t. Its just instruction to not pass authority/votes, the bot will still see the link. And Google isn’t 100% accurate. People should take time to look at their counted links in Google Webmaster Tools, you’d be surprised how many nofollows they slip up and count.
Lastly, not ever search engine uses nofollows. Google is the big daddy right now, but at one time Yahoo was #1. There is no promise Google will dominate the market forever.
Good points, Zombie. I agree that stressing dofollow over nofollow can get to be a game with no winner. There is more to social networking than link building. You have to also look at the traffic benefits. And it is true that Google does some time slip up and count a nofollow link. There is no purity in SEO.
How about Stumbleupon? they use do follow or no follow? I’m confuse wich is more important, content or backlinks?
@The Faust – A follow is the best case senario but, I normally use social bookmarking as a vechical to get visitors for the content submitted. In either case, be careful not to abuse it!
submit and get link back do follow social bookmarking at oopza.com
I think most of the social bookmarking sites are removing the follow tag. May be they are purely concentrating on TRAFFIC.