Search Advisory

Now that we’ve covered blogs, social networking profiles, microblogging, and video/photo-sharing sites, let’s turn our attention to social bookmarking sites.  I’m going to cover the three most popular, Delicious, StumbleUpon and Digg.  Even though I’ve lumped these three sites into the same category, they actually are quite different.

Today, let’s talk about Delicious, one of the first true social bookmarking sites.  It was originally launched at http://del.icio.us by someone being clever with the URL, but now it’s at the much easier to remember and type www.delicious.com.  Delicious launched as a site to save your bookmarks online rather than on your hard drive through your browser’s “favorites”, so when you’re using different computers, they’re always available.

Over time, people started sharing bookmarks with other people on Delicious and using it to discover new sites from people who share their interests.  Delicious tracks how many times each web page has been bookmarked, so this is another instance where social media “popularity” may indirectly affect organic rankings.

Delicious allows its users to save as many links as they’d like, and you can control the anchor text of the link itself, which is great.  I put search terms in the anchor text, as well as the description of the web page and the tags for that bookmark.

Important: Delicious does use the “nofollow” tag on all their links, so supposedly they don’t pass along any link juice.  However, I strongly suspect that some juice may be passed along, plus it can’t hurt to have search terms in the anchor text of the links.  Delicious is fast, free, and easy to use, so while it may not have a tremendous impact on your organic rankings, it’s still worthwhile.