Social Bookmarking could lose you PageRank... Que?

by Garrick Jones

According to the Google blog (the posting has subsequently been taken down), Google will be adopting a new strategy to reduce the PageRank of sites making use of linking from social bookmarking sites such as Digg and del.icio.us.

This could have some serious implications for certain sites. But what does this mean? I am going to look at this from a basic point of view and try to make a little sense of  it all below. Why? Well to be honest, I'm no SEO guru and I need to break it down to the essentials for myself. So here goes.

First of all what is PageRank? It is a statistical assessment that Google uses to determine a page's popularity or importance. The ranking is on a scale from 1-10, with 10 being the highest. How do they determine the ranking? Well, as most of us know, a very important aspect of achieving a high ranking is through the external links to your site.

As Google puts it:

"PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B."

So Google looks at a link as a vote of confidence from another site, but the ranking of the site that is casting the 'vote' also plays a role. Essentially, the higher the PageRank of the site casting the vote, the more influence that link will have on improving the PageRank of your page. The more votes, the higher the PageRank and so on and so forth.

Now that we have that out of the way, where does social bookmarking come in?  As already mentioned, you need quality inbound links and social bookmarking is the way to do just that. In promoting one's site, there are few methods more effective than social bookmarking.

Social bookmarking is an Internet-based platform that allows people to create list of links to Web pages they like. Basically links are listed on a network, then an individual signed into that network can find links pertaining to the keywords they are searching for.

I think of them as search engine result ranked by users' votes, so those with the most votes (and those that should be informative and interesting) will rise to the top. These pages are then referred to by other users in the network with the posting of the links multiplying and a consequent boost in the page ranking. In short, if you have a start-up and manage to be successful with social bookmarking you will go long way in ensuring good PageRank and help the success of your business.

With Google looking to change this, those sites that rely heavily on bookmarking (often themselves) will need to start shifting strategy or face a dramatic drop in PageRank later this year. This will specifically target those sites embracing deceptive, unnatural linking strategies such as creating multiple accounts and bookmarking their own pages repeatedly.

For those relying on traditional, natural search traffic and using these social bookmarking platforms responsibly, Google claim they have nothing to worry about. I tend to agree and have faith that Google will consider all factors with the end-user in mind before implementing such a change.

How this would actually effect the average Internet user such as myself is yet to be seen, so should you click on one of those little pictures down below? I think we'll be okay for now :-)

2008/03/20 | permalink | comments (8) | trackbacks (0)

  Bookmark this on ... BlinkBits BlinkList Blogmarks Buddymarks CiteUlike Connotea del.icio.us Digg it FeedMarker feedmelinks Furl Give a Link Gravee igooi Lilisto Linkagogo Linkroll ma.gnolia Maple.nu Netvouz Onlywire RawSugar reddit Scuttle Shadows Simpy Sphinn Spurl tagtooga TalkDigger Wink Yahoo MyWeb