The main aim of most webmasters is usually to get as many visitors to their site and get the highest PR ranking they can. One of the ways in which this has been done recently, over the past year was through social bookmarking. Social bookmarking is the act of favouring pages from your website on a bookmarking site (stumbleupon, diggit for example), these links would then, theoretically, bring the Google crawler to your site, bringing backlinks, traffic and quick updates on the search engine. However, after so much time is social bookmarking really worth the time and efforts or has it become a dead niche?

One of the first sites to start using social bookmarking was stumbleupon, on this site you would ‘stumble’ a webpage and followers or browsers could see it had been added to the site where they would hopefully take a look. However, many other sites also offered this service, Google, Yahoo, Ask now even Facebook lets you do it to some extent. But, the big difference between what you can get today in social bookmarking and in the past is the do follow link. Google announce not too long ago that it would be cracking down on sites that were selling links or hoarding links in order to manipulate rankings if they did not make those link ‘nofollow’. What this basically meant was that link juice (backlink building) took a strong hit with the vast majority of social bookmarking sites going nofollow based, in turn this many the mass hoard of webmasters that were using this service stopped and many sites took a hit on traffic. Some of the smaller sites even closed down.

So before you sign up to 100+ social bookmarking sites and make a bunch of logins, you may want to ask what your goal is from it as it seems that the slow trickle of visitors is the best social bookmarking can offer in today’s world.