The Demo Site

Since seeing for myself how social bookmarking can affect the visibility of an article, it has become clear some social bookmarking sites are more effective than others in helping to build traffic. To date StumbleUpon is possibly the most useful place to add a bookmark because of the way users ‘stumble’ upon content. Digg is also recommended because bookmarks added to the site often show in Google’s search engine results. Apart from reasons of this kind another factor that separates some social bookmarking sites from others is whether they provide dofollow or nofollow links.

Why should anyone concern themselves whether or not a link is dofollow or nofollow? The answer lies in the way links work for a website; the more links a site has the more popular it is likely to be with search engines. Until some time ago this was exploited by a number of people by adding links to places like forums and blogs without contributing constructively to the website. In other words they spammed online content in order to achieve better search engine placements, so as a consequence the nofollow link tag was adopted.

These days it is more than likely that a link added to a forum or to someone else’s blog will be nofollow. Nofollow means that when a search engine bot crawls a website it can be instructed not to follow the link to someone else’s site. If the bot doesn’t follow the link then no link juice will be gained from that link. Link juice is simply a term for your site gaining better credence with search engines through the sites it links to, and so achieving better positions.

This isn’t to say nofollow links have no value at all, after all they can of course direct traffic to your site or blog. But nofollow links simply won’t help to boost your online content in the search engine page rankings.

So, when adding your link to a social bookmarking site, or any place on the internet it helps if you know whether it will offer a nofollow or a dofollow link. This can be determined by going to the site and clicking on the page source tab from your browser’s menu. If links within the page code are nofollow then the link tags will include this:

rel="nofollow"

A dofollow link is in reality just a normal link and that’s how it will look in the page’s source code.

If your browser of choice is Firefox there are two other quick and easier ways to see if links on a page are dofollow or nofollow. The first is to right click on the link and then click on properties. If the link is nofollow you will see the rel="nofollow" added to the link tag.

There is also a browser extension for Firefox named NoDofollow which quickly enables you to see what links on a page are dofollow or nofollow. Once installed it will be located under the tools menu in the browser. Click on its tab from the menu and all the nofollow links on the webpage will be highlighted pink and dofollow links will be highlighted blue.

A website I have found helpful in showing which social bookmarking sites offer dofollow or nofollow links is SocialMarker which also helps in automating the process of adding a page to social bookmarking sites. It lists 51 of the most popular social bookmarking sites and by hitting the appropriate tab you can choose to add your content to either all of these sites, the best or those that are dofollow.

There is also a window which automatically displays the usual information most social bookmarking sites require to add a link, (such as title and description etc). Once you visit a bookmarking site, information from each box can be dragged to the relevant area of the page to be added. Instructions are easy to follow so visiting the page will clarify how to use it rather than reading a lengthy description here.

As a final passing note, Article Writers Network, the social network I set up in part to provide an extra somewhere for writers to add bookmarks to their work offers dofollow links, so can be a handy place to add a little extra link juice to an article. To get a clear idea how the site works take a look at the About page.