Is mass submission to social bookmarking sites a waste of time?

[Chabrenas]

Many MMO schemes recommend using automated mass submission of page URLs as one of the ways to build backlinks (and short bursts of traffic). I think the idea is that some of the people who like what they see will put a link to it somewhere.

However, my understanding of most of the Social Bookmarking sites is that most of your chance for fame comes between the time you submit to the time you disappear off the front page. This is why some people recommend timing submissions to appear when your target audience is at its busiest.

I've just done an experiment with a medical/health information site I am building. I submitted two run-of-the-mill pages to every site on the list at an automated submitter site two days ago, and my host stats app (AWstats) shows no visits from any Social Bookmarking site and no increase in traffic to either of the pages. Today, I submitted by hand to StumbleUpon - at a period when the US was asleep - a page which contained advice on how to determine whether the person who just stumbled and fell in front of you at a party had actually had a stroke, and that if you called a doctor quickly they would probably recover completely. Ten hours later, AWstats showed three visits from StumbleUpon and triple the traffic I would have expected without the Social Bookmark.

Should I wait longer before making a judgement, or am I right in saying that it's a waste of time submitting mundane pages (however good they are) to Social Bookmarking sites?

[crabfoot]

Not a waste of time, but a lot of effort for the return you get. If you're making manual links, work out how to use places like Yahoo answers or other Q&A sites - if you're careful, links from those places can last a long while. If you're not careful, the mods delete them.

Once your sites start to gain authority, you can give yourself links that will be more effective for less effort.

[aneil4lom]

I find most social bookmarking sites don't bring that much traffic back. Digg and Reddit bring almost nothing to my sites. I get good results with Stumbleupon.
Sometimes the day I submit a link, i'll get a spike in traffic followed by a month of above average traffic.

I always like to submit manually because I like to be sure it's being submitted properly.

I think that somehow Stumbleupon could sense the "quality" of what your'e submitting because when I submit an original article it does well but when i submit blog posts that link to that same article; i don't get that much traffic back.

[Chabrenas]

Thanks, crabfoot and aneil4lom. Can either of you comment on the longer term traffic (and its chances of converting to backlinks)? I'd expect, once more, that only exceptional posts would generate delayed traffic.

Also, what do you feel about the swamping of unproductive sites? My gut feel is that it could have a negative influence - if not now, then at some future date as G improves its algorithms. In any case, it offends my sense of ethics.

[Slowdive]

Hello Chabrenas.

I feel a little like a broken record sometimes as I keep repeating myself, all be it to different folks. So no reflection on yourself, but when ever people ask about traffic generation, why else submit en-mass to social media? I always say the same thing....

You need to define what kind of traffic you need, if your site serves up adsense or some other form of mass market affiliated program and all you need is clicks? Well then it may be viable as you do not care if your end user is 10 or 100 as long as they might just click on your add block. For this sort of site, sure any traffic may prove viable or lucrative so why not, if you have no better plan for the day submit.

If however you are selling green tea? Your time would be better spent commenting with great information on a tea drinkers blog, thus bringing in targeted traffic.

More over if your goal is to get traffic from social bookmarking sites, make sure you attach something very interesting to it. Strategize, I want traffic from people that play world of war craft, so I will make sure my link points to a page on a site that offers free WOW information, even better e-books, even better downloads and mods. Thus I go and get the cool download and tell my friends to go get and bam your link begins to work for you.....

It does not matter if your social book marking, blog commenting or asking a site to link you, a valuable link is one that offers something worth clicking on.

[Chabrenas]

Thanks, Slowdive. In this case, I'm trying to use one of many popular techniques for generating backlinks, for an Adsense site with information and advice about common diseases. This means that most people would have an interest in something on my site, even if that's not what was on their minds at the time of visiting the bookmarking site.

I'm looking for the most effective way of using my time when submitting to bookmarking sites, for this Adsense-monetised site. Perhaps my goal should be to find the fastest way to build traffic that converts. I shall certainly be doing whatever I believe will build my site's reputation and authority, but I expect that to take a long time since I have no presence in the field at the moment. You make me want to follow my gut feel and submit only selected pages to specific bookmarkers (often minority ones in a relevant filed), but would this be the best way to use my time?

[Slowdive]

I'll be upfront and say that adsense or any mass traffic based systems are not my speciality, which is not to say some people are not making a killing . I however would still say if you have common diseases, create some content about rarer ones, or unusual conditions. Then find a yahoo question about them and answer it quoting your site as the source of this information, that nearly has to convert into clicks. Also make sure your site has links to even further information, if one has a site of this nature it really does need to be a useful, really useful resource.

Also if you are looking to make money from this try and find a way to leverage some affiliate income or lead generation for suggesting treatments, especially in the case of say vitiligo. Most current treatments are merely skin pigmenting creams so they do not need FDA approval. If you can find one that really works, and get your aff/lead link clicked a lot its profit for certain.

Just a thought, good luck!

[Clinton]

Chabrenas, there are some sites that work well with social bookmarking and some that don't. Post some really cool CSS trick and you could get floods of SB activity with little to no effort. That's the dev community for you. Same thing with the Linux communities. If I post a Linux hack I don't need to do much else. One of the Linux enthusiasts would pick it up and run. No so, I suspect, in your niche.

Especially for an Adsense monetised site I suspect social bookmarking may not be good use of time. Visitors from SB are known to not be great ad clickers. There are numerous programs available that will mass submit to social bookmarking sites; there are people available who'll use their vast social profile to promote your site to their network for a few bucks etc, there are SEO companies that will get their userbase to "Digg" or "thumbsup" or "+1" your story for a small payment. If you're really keen on SB would it be better to explore those options to do the spacing out of SB that you're looking for?

Recommended reading

[Kay]

Going back to the OP:

Many MMO schemes recommend using automated mass submission of page URLs as one of the ways to build backlinks (and short bursts of traffic). I think the idea is that some of the people who like what they see will put a link to it somewhere.

I've seen these things too. My impression was that they're not so much suggesting it for traffic, or even other people linking to you but more to build the backlinks so G will see your site as being more worthy of "trust". That should push you up the SERPs - and then you'll get more traffic from G. Brilliant! Yet more reliance on G.

I personally wouldn't give a toss if I got traffic from SU or not, and I wouldn't expect SUers to link to my site either. For me, the main purpose of the exercise is to improve your position in Google.

It does seem a rather tedious way to go about things - even with the automated software to submit everywhere. You have to keep doing it, the algos change all the time, and so do the SERPs. Also, the whole premise is based on a reliance on traffic from the Gorg. It may well be that the time is better spent on creating backlinks or traffic by some other means than mindlessly plodding through this recipe to try to game G for the next few weeks.

[Slowdive]

The one consideration is when the Algos change and SuperSiteShare becomes what some would call bad google neighbourhood? I know its common belief that bad links cant really hurt you unless you reciprocate, so as to stop me scuppering my competitor but still....I have little faith in google in regards to what they may do next.

For trust I would still focus on linking with respected sites in my niche. Give me 50 of those links over 50k social sites any-day. That said I also try and avoid competitive markets so if you have to pick advice to follow, Kays beats mine for improving google trust I think