Social Bookmarking and Directory Submissions – Do they really work?

The recent Panda announcement by Google regarding the quality of links and how they will be counted in the search engine algorithm has a lot of marketers re-thinking their SEO strategies. Two of the main areas of concern are social bookmarking and directory submissions. Will they still work or is Google going to ignore them? Did all that hard work go to waste? Many companies are checking their stats to see if page rank positioning for certain keywords has dropped. In some cases it has, dramatically. How do you know if it’s related to Panda or just another of those classic Google “slaps”.

If you’ve been using one of those automated submission services where you can buy directory submissions and social bookmarks for pennies apiece, stop. You might have gotten a few backlinks under the radar in the past, but chances are if you go to your webmaster tools and check your link count right now they have all disappeared. Manual submission to high PR directories has always been the strategy here at First Page Placements and none of our clients have lost any ground. As with anything else in life, positive results come from hard work. Short cuts don’t work in SEO.

As far as social bookmarking is concerned, a common misconception is that those links are somehow worth more because of the size of the social networks. They don’t bring you more link juice than any other directory submission, but they do bring you more traffic. Getting a link posted into a conversation thread on Facebook will only give you one link in search engine algorithmic calculations, but it could bring multiple hits from those who can see the thread. That’s how social networking works.

Panda made it very clear that content will be the leading factor in Google’s search engine page rank calculations. Article directories, those that have legitimate editorial standards, will be a much more attractive option for link builders in the immediate future. Will Yahoo and Bing follow suit and change their formulas? It’s likely that the process has already begun. If you want to stay on top of it, do yourself a favor and hire First Page Placements to do your marketing and submissions for you.