Social Bookmarking Votes - Are They Important?

Social Bookmarking Sites Like Digg and Propeller can Have a Huge Effect on Your Search Engine Rankings Especially If You Get Enough Votes From Other Readers

Social bookmarking sites are a hot topic these days. But the truth of the matter is that most people have no idea how the social media sites really work. They submit their stories to the more popular social media (e.g. Digg and Propeller) and expect to get traffic rushing to their website.

However, think about this, and I will use Digg as an example: If Digg has 5 million users and the average number of posts, from all Digg users combined, is 1 post per day, that is 5 million posts.

How can you possibly expect that Google will find your story amidst the 5 million other stories. In fact if you submit your site to the social media and no one else votes for it, I have come to feel that it is a negative indicator in Google’s eyes. The worst thing you can do is submit your posts yourself and then get no votes.

I have seen articles that got like 1000 visitors in a few days and 50 some comments. However, he only got 12 votes (Diggs in this case). Now tell me this: Don’t you think that if Google is seeing 50+ Diggs as a positive indicator of a websites’ quality, wouldn't Google see 1000 visitors and 12 Diggs as a negative indicator of this web page and the website itself? After all, if only 1% likes the page enough to bookmark it, it cannot be of too high quality.

Clearly, submitting quality content is half the battle. But it still does not solve the entire problem. After all, the story is hard to find amidst 5 million others. What you need besides content is votes. The only way to get this type of support is to advertise your story so that others are made aware of its existence.