As mentioned, one of the biggest draws that social bookmarking sites have to webmasters is the fact that they represent high volume, high quality backlinking opportunities. In addition to taking away the usefulness of link farms with their recent updates, Google also stated that they would begin looking at the quality of the sites that backlinks originate from. This makes developing a large number of backlinks even more challenging. However, social media sites are already considered high quality sites, meaning that webmasters can use them for backlinking purposes without fear of ranking demotion.
Websites that are linked on social media sites can also benefit from Google’s new emphasis on social media. The search engine has begun counting positive social media feedback and activity towards a website’s search engine rankings. This means that websites that are linked on social bookmarking sites increase their ranking through both social networking participation and through high quality backlinks.
Another reason that social bookmarks are beneficial to websites is because being on them increases the speed and frequency that those websites are indexed. Web pages that have a large number of links and online activity are crawled by search engines more often than others. This is extremely helpful for new websites, and established web pages can benefit from the quick addition of new content to search engines. Further, Google also is now focused on promoting websites that offer fresh content, meaning that if a website is updated and indexed on a regular basis, its search engine ranking should rise quickly. Learn more about social bookmarking and SEO.