20 March 2008
The SEO community was the victim of an interesting hoax this week when a blogger claimed that Google was about to punish sites that relied on social bookmarking to build links. In response, Google’s, Matt Cutts quickly explained that the rumours were false but the issue raised some interesting points.
John Mu, a Google employee, stated that:
I would not worry too much about a blog post that doesn't seem to exist. That said, keep in mind that PageRank is roughly based on the quantity and quality of the links pointing to a page. Traffic from self-created bookmarks does not really play a role in that, at least not directly.
If you have great, unique and compelling content then chances are that people will want to refer their friends to it, no matter if they originally found the link to your site on a social bookmarking site or through word of mouth.
The key is that Google wants to count natural links that are editorially given due to good content. It doesn't want to count links that site owners create themselves.
Keep up to date with industry and Nomensa news by signing up to Nomensa newsletters.
