Profile links and Social Bookmarking as SEO?

[patmcluk]

I often read SEO blogs and there is much talk about Social Bookmarking and Profile Links as easy ways of building up one-way backlinks.

I have just started using them to up my website profiles, and offering them as a service to other webmasters, but does anyone have any strong feelings about their overall SEO worth?

[dhayman]

Yes, all in moderation.....make sure they don't make up a majority of your backlinks, or Google will frown big-time. Additionally, make sure that the information your posting is relevant to the conversation.....Google has made mention of the fact that they will penalize those who "drop links".

[Nandakishore]

I have not bothered much about the SEO effect of such links, but I know that I get some traffic regularly from information I digg or twitt etc.

[patmcluk]

...................................... Additionally, make sure that the information your posting is relevant to the conversation.....Google has made mention of the fact that they will penalize those who "drop links".

I don't mean "comment spam", i mean just creating a profile on a website that allows you to include your link in your profile. Not actually spamming anyone!

[Doolally]

I don't think a profile link will count for much when it comes to backlinks. Most likely Google won't include the profile pages in its crawl or disregard them when it does unless, of course, they have backlinks pointing to the profile page then I guess it would make a difference.

However, having your link in your signature and contributing in a useful way to a forum thread will be counted albeit with a tiny amount of link juice.

My take on it anyway.

[patmcluk]

Do you mean if Google has a backlink to a profile, or do you have to create one?

[bbonline]

Do you mean if Google has a backlink to a profile, or do you have to create one?

I usually checked on my sites BL in a weekly basis and it surprised me when google shows some of my web profiles, in facebook, twitter, identi.ca, forums profile, answer sites and article profile. It actually counts.

[cameronlove4]

As per my personal experience goes... Social bookmarking has helped me a lot in getting a lot of valuable visitors. Some of the best are Stumbleupon and Digg. If you are able to place your Digg among the first 10 results of search terms then you'll surely get lots and lots of visitors for sure.

[Doolally]

Do you mean if Google has a backlink to a profile, or do you have to create one?

If you create a backlink or two to your profile, Google will believe that you are worth linking to and rank your profile page higher. Of course, if your link is on that page then some of the link juice will flow to that link.

[Doolally]

If you create a backlink or two to your profile, Google will believe that you are worth linking to and rank your profile page higher. Of course, if your link is on that page then some of the link juice will flow to that link.

Thinking about it. You could easily create a page on your site showing where you post and linking to your various profile pages.

[patmcluk]

I was just thinking that myself! It sounds like it is worth a try.

[catchingsmoke]

It's pretty much a complete waste of time for a site trying to compete in gambling. in other fields it can help, but not in ours. If you want to build free backlinks article directories and making free blogs are about the only this worth doing, and even they wont have a massive impact.

[patmcluk]

Why would it work for other niches but not gambling? Surely a link is a link whatever industry you are in?

[catchingsmoke]

because gambling is so fiercely competed that you would need millions of them to have an impact and at which point you'd be flagged as a spamer, whereas if you we're trying to rank for something micro nich like "west yorkshire laundrettes" then they might help you, the only other real benefit of SBM is that they keep spiders crawling your sites regularly.

so if you update your site about every hour or so it might possibly be worth you time.

They're good for building backlinks to you feeder sites, if you have any, but for a serious competetor in the gambling affiliate market, where there is actually competition then they are useless.

Basically if you want free links, try do follow blog commenting or submit free blogs yourself enough of them you can get some real weight behind you I've taken a site from new to ranking top ten for it's key terms, in admitedly softer part of the gambling market, (france) on a budget of $25/month, it was just a little test. But most of the work I did was creating free blogs to support it.

[patmcluk]

I added a post to the Google Webmaster Blog recently, where they quite clearly said they were going to clamp down on comment spam, so surely SBM is an added "White Hat" way of gaining backlinks, whatever niche!