Should I Do a Social Bookmarking Campaign and a Tier 2 Linking?

[zorsto]

I don't see anything bad in manually creating links on different (about 50) social bookmarking services. Is this method labeled as White Hat?

I was wondering if it would be fine to create Tier 2 linking (probably blog comments) for indexing of the social bookmarking links?

Please share your thoughts on the topic.

[RickyShockley]

Hey Zoran,

From my understanding social bookmarking on small and rarely used sites will have VERY little positive affect on search rankings. I like to follow Eric Ward's golden rule: ask yourself..would you want this link if Google did not exist?

Definitely think your time could be better utilized elsewhere!

[Chris.Menke]

Zoran,

Looks like you picked up a copy of the 1996's Backpackers Guide to Linkbuilding.  As Ricky said, that stuff's not worth much today.  Basically, the more control you have over a link today, the less it is worth--with bookmarks being at the low end of the scale and editorial links from authoritative resources on the other end.  Rather than spending your time at the low end, work on building out your social media profiles and figuring out who your audience is so you can publsh content for them and announce that content through your social channels.

Moz Chap. 7 Growing Popularity & Links

[brad.s.knutson]

If all you plan to do is drop your links in social bookmarking sites, you're probably just wasting your time.  It's not likely that these links will be worth anything to search engines - even if they are followed links.  The time you spend building these links could be spend developing great content, or working on other link-building opportunities that would be more worthwhile.

As far as blog comments go - if your goal is to get backlinks, it's not a good idea.  These links are nofollowed and too many of them will look spammy to search engines.  If you are commenting to engage with the content author, that's a different story.  I often comment on other sites to engage with the content author and start a conversation.  I sometimes choose to include my website as a reference, but I often choose to leave it out.

[zorsto]

I definitely don't plan this to be my only strategy.

I have successful websites ranking well for some pretty competetive keywords. Besides social media signals, established blog mentions etc. I thought this could give the website an additional bump to rank for some other competetive keywords.

[brad.s.knutson]

The thing is though - these methods will not increase your rankings.  Google has pretty much devalued any links that we have some form of control over (directories, forums, blog comments, social bookmarking sites - even guest posting).