Recently I published a very popular post on 20 Social Networking Sites that are good for building links. I put a lot of work into the research behind that project and isolated 20 great Social Sites that actually were useful for good old fashioned link building in the true SEO sense of the terms. Of course it was submitted it to some Social Sites and it did well, so far in fact as of right now it has

• 74 Diggs
• 51 Sphinns
• 19 Plugs
• 34 Mixxes
• 49 Propellers

Now that is a good mix of social sites and not a bad result for an SEO type post especially on Digg and Propeller. The comments were mostly good too, however, one poster took a big exception to my suggestion to self submit to these sites and just basically said it was all spam.

Part of his comment was,

“It’s best to use your brain and not try to exploit community sites in this way. It’s bad for the internet and generally unethical. You’ll accumulate a net negative of goodwill from the internet’s population in the long run.”

If you want to read my direct response just go to the original post and read it there. My question for people today though is, is he right in any way? Is it some how wrong to self submit? I personally do not think so but would like to hear others opinions on this.

My view is as follows considering that if I have that young lady on the left do my submissions I will get great results. As that is the case I think we can agree all things are not “fair and democratic” in the land of social media utopia the way some hard core users seem to claim. In some of these sites you are honestly forced to either get someone to submit for you which I have done on more then one occasion or to submit under a fake name, I am also guilty of that at times. If that is the way of the community just adapting to it makes sense.

That said I do not see why we should see self submission or client submission to a Social Site as being some sort of “evil”. The problem with that is we are judging intent vs. judging content. This is the same moronic logic behind “hate crime laws”. When you submit to these sites it would make sense for the content rather then the intent to be judged.

In many sites that is the case. No one gets bent when you self submit to Sphinn or BiggItUp, of course they are almost 100% internet marketers. Yet look how fast Mixx is taking off, I get great results self submitting to Mixx and no haters are bashing me there. They judge my content and love it or hate it and simply vote as they feel they should. Mixx is not now full of viagra postings and such on the popular pages but my posts have several times made popular there. I self submit to Stumble too, no anger, no bashing and Stumble has great content.

To me social networking has a greater future if we judge the content rather then intent. Who cares if someone wants exposure the “real news” is so driven by PR Firms anyway much of the “pure content” many members are trying to protect is every bit if not more promotional then that of a small business or typical blogger.

So what do you think? Is it OK to self submit or is it evil? I am not asking what works better but only is it right or wrong to do it? Does it pollute the web in some evil way or are a bunch of 16 year olds just hateful of anything with the dirty word “profit” associated with it?

OK so do we really need yet another social bookmarking online community (aka a Digg Clone)? At Franklin Spirko we decided that yes indeed we do and hence the launch of HatedOrLoved.com

The reasoning was simple, there are so many sites like Digg, Mixx, etc that utilize a community approach to share news, stories and just plain cool stuff. In theory they work great and spam is kept down because the community can “bury” (or what ever the equivalent may be for the site) the story and push it off the popular page and out of the normal listings. The theory behind this functionality seems solid enough but the reality is in practice many good (content wise) stories are buried.

These stories could be about god forbid on Digg, SEO, and labeled as spam simply because of the subject. This is one of the factors behind the success of Sphinn. Yet it is not just internet marketers that are beaten down on many social sites. Perhaps the story is political and against the majority thought on the site so it gets crushed. Why should this be? Just because a story is an alternate view does not make it spam, trash or poor content.

So the concept of Hated or Loved is remarkably simple. You don’t bury a story you don’t like, you “Hate It” which is far more and expression of opinion then a false need to push a story 40 other people found worthy out of the popular results. When we are done with our next set of modifications you will be able to view not just upcoming and popular stories but hated stories as well.

So each day you can check out the most hated and loved stories online, we though the concept was kind of cool so our new Web Developer (Bobby Wilson) went to work less then a week ago and we have the Beta (very beta) site up already. We invite you to sign up, sumit your content and play around with some hatred and love.

A few things to note about the site for right now

• When I say Beta I mean Beta the “Featured Hated” does not function yet. It requires a lot of work to basically recreate the algorithms for popular on the other side of things. So ignore the “Top 10 Hated for Now” it is just a place holder.

• The avatar function is not working right yet so you can’t upload a picture with your profile just yet. Bobby is working on it, the platform we are using is on PHPDug, if anyone has over come this issue we would love to hear from you about it.

• This site is designed to be SEO and Marker Friendly you most certainly are welcome to submit both third party and your own stories. We do not use nofollow and we do have permalinks for each story. So feel free to link build away in your submitting.

• When you find a bug let us know about it but give us some time. Again right now we are in really a pre beta mode but wanted to start getting some SEO exposure and some founding members right away so we decided to open up the site.

• We are looking for help with this project. I need both contributors and probably moderators in the near future if you want to be considered for either let me know. If you have a blog and blog about solid content (in any niche) we will consider adding your feed to the site for automatic inclusion. If your are interested just post your blog link in the comments and we will evaluate your site for auto inclusion.

So please let us know what you think of this new concept for a site, let us know your ideas to make the site better and by all means let us know what you love and what you hate.

~ Jack Spirko

Most site owners tend to build links in a very one dimensional way. What I mean is that they are prone to building all their links directly to the target page they are attempting to rank for a given key word or phrase in the search engine results. What I mean by this is easily illustrated in the diagram below. Do not give much thought to the sources of the links in the diagram below as they are only examples of possible sources of commonly created links.

The problem with the above approach to link building is it does nothing to boost the power of the pages giving your target page the links. This will in time require far more total links to produce a desired ranking in Google or other major search engines. In fact many sources of such links like Squidoo, Social Bookmarks or Articles in well respected directories are only effective because the sites they are hosted on have a given amount of link value simply because they are on large and trusted sites.

Smart search engine optimization experts know that such inherent link value can easily be increased by simply interlinking these sources. In other words by linking an article or press release published on a well respected site to a page on a site like Squidoo or Hubpages the power of the Squidoo or Hubpage is exponentially increased over the power of either of them individually. You can then pass on that power to your target web page. With this in mind look at how one might structure the same 7 links that we looked at in the first diagram.

The diagram below consolidates the power of 5 of these links into two main pages that I call “power heads”. By taking this approach each of the pages builds increased power as the total web structure is created.

Again do not put to much emphasis upon which sites are where in this diagram. There are many sources of such links including links on partner websites, natural links, viral links etc. The point here is to think about the term “deep linking” in a new way. Typically “deep links” are considered links that link into sub pages of your websites rather then just the home or primary pages of the site. Of course this is very important, however, my suggestion is to also think about “deep links” on the other side of the equation.

In addition to “depth” into your site intentionally build “depth” back into the external side of your link networks. Taking this approach in addition to conventional link building results in much better and much faster search engine rankings for highly competitive key words and phrases.

When this approach is applied to “long tail” phrases it is particularly deadly! Doing so not only often results in landing your target page at position number one in the SERPs, it will often end up with many of the pages where you build your links in the top ten results as well yielding not just positive results but high “frequency” in the top ten results. In other words if people end up on your web page great but if not they may indeed end up on an article that will refer them to you or perhaps a press release or some other content that can push them on to your target content.

Working with this type of link building on long tail terms is also an immense learning experience. As you build this external link depth and watch the SERPs change a very telling picture tends to form about which sites have the most relative ability to pass link power and gain their own SERPs.

As of late, I have been seeing a tremendous amount of buzz and informational products built around the concept of using social bookmark sites such as Digg, Diigo, Delicious, etc. as an easy way to build quality back links to your content and help drive Search Engine Rankings. One thing that I have always found quite troubling about this concept is how so many of these articles and products mention Social Bookmarking sites that might have the potential to drive traffic, however they do absolutely nothing to build quality backlinks.

Such sites fall into two primary categories…

• Category One – Sites that utilize rel=”nofollow” to prevent any link value from being passed on to the target content. Some people feel there is still some value in these links and our own testing has shown they do have some effect, however, that effect is at very best minimal.

• Category Two – Sites that utilize domain redirection to send visitors off to your target content. This works as follows, you link to yoursite.com/article1 but in your posting the social website links to socialwebsite.com/redirect=yoursite.com/article1 or in some other similar matter. Such links are not seen by the search engines as a link to you but as internal links to the social website. They will not and can not affect your search rankings in any way.

So I started out this little project as simply having the goal to make a list of social bookmark sites that did two things:

• Did not use domain redirection
• Did not use rel=”nofollow”

Simple right? Well I thought so until I started with a list of almost 250 various social media websites and by the time I eliminated those that did not function properly, were to specialized into a given niche, did not allow access to the site with out registering (read that as did not let spiders into the content) and obeyed the direct linking rules I was down to just about 20 odd sites.

I then began to think about some other factors that were evident and a few I decided were important enough to create a basic ranking system on a 10 Star rating system. Here are the factors I considered and my reasoning behind them.

• Google PR on The Home Page – I decided to give each site 1 point if that site had a Google PR of a 4 or higher on the main page of the site. The real value of published PR numbers is very questionable but it does give us some indication of link value. PR4 simply seemed like a reasonable expectation for sites like these to achieve.

• Google PR on the Sub Pages – This is another area where I just had to pick a number and go with it. I simply checked the main sub pages of each site to see if any were at least a PR3. Reason being that it may give some indication of how well the site passes link value on through its internal links. This is important because even if you make page one you won’t be there for very long. If the site had at least one PR3 sub page it earned one additional point.

• Does the Site Use PermaLinks – By this I mean when you submit content is a specific page created on the site just for that content. This is one of the most critical factors in my opinion so if the site uses permalinks it got two points. There reason there is so much value to this is it will allow you to build additional off site links to your posted content and build even more link value.

• Does the Site refrain from using NoFollow or Redirection – If not, the site does not even get on the list; but to round out my scale to an even 10 star system each site gets one point for this critical component.

• Is the Alexa Ranking 10K or better – This list is not about driving traffic at all, only about link value and building back links with it. Yet if a site has high traffic volume it will continue to gain more and more of its own links and build power. Hence a site with a 10K or better Alexa rank was given one point due to the fact that link value on the site in theory should continue to rise.

• Does the Site Use Anchor Links - This is another very critical factor in link building and on some levels it matters a lot more then the raw value of the page that provides the link. Some services give you a link that begins with http://. Such links are no where as near as valuable as a link that is formated with anchor text under your control. So each site received or lost two points for this factor. This factor alone dropped Propeller from a 10 to an 8.

• Is the Domain over Two Years of Age – There are two primary factors at play on this one. First in theory an older site should have more “trust” to pass on then younger sites. Perhaps more important though is that an older site is less likely to pull the old switch-er-oo on you. Here is what I mean by that. Many social sites start out giving you great links to get a lot of submissions at first. Then one day switch to redirects or nofollow to horde link juice, an older site in theory should be less likely to do this. This is in no way perfect so only one point was given based on this factor.

• Are more then 10,000 pages from the site indexed in Google – This is another one where I just had to pick a number, but 10K seemed reasonable for these types of sites. I dropped down to the 1000th result to check for supplementals and left it good at that if they were still showing valid content. One point was awarded for meeting this goal.

With that I put together my list and started judging them, as you consider the results the following things should be understood and considered.

1. The criteria was set before I determined how the sites would score. Once I set the rules, no exceptions were made for any site based on my personal feelings.
2. Factors like indexed pages and PR change often. In the week I worked on gathering this data more than three of these sites moved up or down do to such changes. These results are based on how things are as of March 4th 2008, they could change tomorrow.
3. No order of preference is given for sites that have matching scores. So this list is not saying that Metafilter is ranked higher then Digg or that IndianPad is higher then Mixx.
4. It bares repeating that this has nothing to do with direct referral traffic. This rating system is based on the value of building back links with these services for SEO and nothing more.
5. If your personal “Pet Social Site” is not listed it is not out of malice in any way. I found as many sites as I could that met the dofollow and no redirection criteria as swiftly as I could. If you know of a site that should be added to the list, please post a comment and we will try to add it.
6. Some sites can be “forced” into compliance with nofollow in a way. Such as postings on Reddit have nofollow removed after so many votes, etc. Such sites were not included. The criteria of valid back links for any and all submissions was religiously enforced.

So here is the list of sites and how they scored in each category,

How to get the most out of this data.

• First, you should understand that I am not claiming that my system is perfect but I do think it is a valid way to “classify” social sites. As you build content that you bookmark you may want to take on the approach of bookmarking one piece of content into something like 2 of the 10 star sites, 2 of the 9s, etc and rotate things often so you build links in a way that is quite random.

• Next, don’t bookmark under the same name or handle all the time. This is not suggesting that you have multiple IDs so you can go voting for yourself. No, it is simply so you don’t end up with all your submissions associated together in one single profile. A simple tool like RoboForm can help you with this.

• When you put content into a site that uses permalinks, take the extra step from time to time (think random) to create a link to that permalink. Lots of sources come to mind, a Squidoo Lenses, Blogger or WP Blogs, an Article in a Directory, a Press Release, etc. This builds the value of the link on that page and often you can get the submission itself to pop for a variety of terms in the SERPs.

• Do not expect to rely on sites like these as your sole source of link building. Think of these links like taking vitamins if you are an athlete. Consider your daily link building and viral link building to be like training and exercising etc. The vitamins (social links) help to put you over the top but they won’t make you one of the best alone.

I hope this list will continue to grow and become a valuable resource for people that want to build quality back links via social bookmarking websites. If you have suggestions for improving the list, sites you want us to consider adding or just comments or questions on this project, just leave a comment below.