How to Determine the Quality of a Social Bookmarking Site?

Social bookmarking websites played a crucial role towards building links to any website. They are still playing a crucial role in link building. Do you know how to determine the quality of a social bookmarking site? Read on this blog post to understand which social bookmarking sites are safe for your website.

Today is the Dussehra and we also know this day as Vijaya Dashmi. I want to wish happy Dussehra to all the readers of my blog. On this auspicious occasion I wish all the happiness in your life and the fulfillment of all the dreams. Those who are not aware about Vijayadashmi can check this post by Wiki on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vijayadashami

Coming back to the topic which I selected for today, actually I did not picked this topic for blogging today, but one of the readers of my blog asked me some questions about a previous blog of mine. I am sure you all have checked my recent blog on link building mistakes which every webmaster should avoid.

One of my visitors Manpreet, pointed out that as I said we should not submit our website on poor quality social bookmarking sites, so her suggestion was that I should come up with some ideas through which we can determine whether a social bookmarking site is of good quality or not. Here are exact words of Manpreet on my blog:

“But I needed some more information from your article. Like you said poor quality bookmarking sites, it would have been good if you had suggested how to determine if a site is poor quality or not or which bookmarking sites should be used and which ones should be avoided and so on.
I am hoping to see articles related to the issue i mentioned.”

To be very frank, I do accept that she put up something very interesting, which I honestly forget to explain in that blog. Though I usually write on such things in almost all the blogs which I write over here, but let me club them all together and prepare this blog post on those signs which can guide you to decide about the quality of a social bookmarking site.

How to Determine the Quality of a Social Bookmarking Site?

I usually say that we should be careful about the links which we build for our website. Now there is a difference in link building and earning. Social bookmarking sites, or article directories, or web directories are the types of site where we usually create content for our website and this way we actually build links on those sites. But social bookmarking sites are a bit different than this concept.

Let me tell you how. Social bookmarking sites are the sites where anyone can submit any link; no matter if it is of their own website or of other website as well. So getting a links from a social bookmarking site is quite easy. Honestly the poor types of social bookmarking sites will be the one where users were concern about submitting their own website only, while good quality social bookmarking sites will be the one where users were not only submit their own website’s link but also from some other website too.

Community Members

So the very first thing which can tell you about the quality of a social bookmarking site is its members. To be very honest social bookmarking websites are nothing but a community and if a community will have all selfish members then obviously its quality will always be low.

Whenever you come through any social bookmarking site, try to check the profile of few members of the society, you can easily understand that you reached to a good site or a bad one. Try to see which links and posts are they sharing, are users submitting useful contents or not?

Useful Content

As I mentioned the community members and their activities as the first criteria of deciding the quality of a social bookmarking site, the second one which I will suggest is to check the categories and the upcoming sections of the social sites. Do scan some of the posts over there and see if they are relevant to the category in which they are submitted or not?

Check if a link to a page which is having information about one latest model of Mercedes Benz should not be there in a social bookmarking sites which deals with SEO or social issues 🙂

Adult Content Links

The third criteria which can help you to understand the quality of a social bookmarking sites is whether the site is having links to posts which has adult content or not. A poor quality social bookmarking sites will have all the bad links which can be clearly identified by a user.

Human Edited Site

Next things which can help you to determine the quality of a social bookmarking website is if it has some process implemented which suggests that the submitted links are being edited by real humans or not.

You can easily understand this from the fact if the site makes live all the submissions or does have auto approval working on it. If you reach to social bookmarking sites and consider it good and submits a link over there, and it comes live on somewhere on that site, then you should stay away from such sites.

If the site holds the link for quality check and later publishes it, it is a clear indication that some sort of mechanism is there which checks all the links which are submitted there.

Domain Authority

Honestly, my opinion about deciding the quality of a social bookmarking site depends on the above mentioned 4 points only, as I do decide the quality of site from the content which exists on it. But then some people can also check the domain authority of the site to understand if it is good or not.

You can check the domain authority of any website through this tool by Moz: Moz Open Site Explorer.

Why am I suggesting anyone to check the domain authority of a website? To be very frank, generally websites with more than 30 site authority are considered as a good one and you can try to get a link from such sites. But on the other hand site authority or Page Rank of a websites is not at all capable of telling the real quality of a website, so I mostly won’t prefer applying these two things.

So these were some of the criteria based on which I usually decide the quality of a social bookmarking websites. Hope I have not missed any criteria, if you know something else which is not even known to me, I would request you all to share with us.

Please do share your opinion about this blog post of mine. Please do let us know what you think about the social bookmarking websites. Please do consider the fact that I don’t want to include any name of any good or bad social bookmarking sites in this post, and hence I did not give any example of such sites.

By the way as I mentioned in many blog posts, it is the age of earning link so every webmaster should always try to earn links through the quality of their site, than to try for building links. So focus on putting quality content on your website so that people will automatically share your links on social bookmarking sites 🙂 The best way to get a link from a social bookmarking site is that always submit good quality, but third party, links on a social site. This will help you to establish yourself as a quality member, and then after some time you can easily submit your own link over there. But before submitting your own link, please make sure that you developed a reputation over there.