Hi, Im reading everywhere that i should add my website to the social bookmark sites, but most of those sites put the rel="nofollow" in the backlinks. so those links do not count for seo.. direct traffic from those links is probably minimal.. so what is the use?
Well.. Those links still count for Yahoo. Also, there are a few very high-profile studies / experiments that have been done that show that Google still gives SERP juice based on no-follow links. So the issue is not that they don't count at all, it's more like they just count less. Still worth doing in my opinion. Just make it part of a broader link-building campaign. It will help round out your links. You want diversity as well as relevancy because this is more natural. BTW - We're running some experiments at Blogskinny.com now. For a short time, we're bookmarking the articles you submit to Blogskinny for free... Cheers...
The nofollow links may not pass link juice, but they still help you rank for keywords. Even though they are nofollowed, they also show up in Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo Site Explorer. Besides getting the backlinks, SB sites can send you some traffic. The smaller SB sites may send little, if any traffic, but it's still a free link. In any Website backlink profile there should be a fair number of nofollow links. This is natural. When people simply avoid building nofollow links, this does not look organic if natural linking is not occuring. Here's another complexity of SB sites. Some don't list your URL at all, but they still pass PR and help you rank for keywords. These types of links are 301'ed, which is a redirect. All the benefits of that redirect pass to your site. I have a small SB list, and it is a work in progress. If you want to check it out, please see my social networking list.
Based on my experience with social bookmarking sites I can tell you that I receive quite a bit of traffic from them. Even though google does not give me any seo benefits I'm glad that I have those links. Social bookmarking can be very effective if it's done correctly, if you don't know much about it you can hire someone to submit your site to the social bookmarking sites.
Will do... Most SB sites using Pligg as a core use 301 redirects. Check out the URL below, because it uses Pligg as well. http://pliggplace(dot).com Hover over the headline link and you will see the outbound URL is a pliggplace(dot)com URL. The out URL's are not nofollowed. Now, copy that URL, and go to a server header test site - one is below. http://www.seoconsultants.com/tools/headers/ Plug in the outbound URL from pliggplace and you will see that the outbound URL's on pliggplace are all 301'ed. Because of the 301, the benefits of this link passes on to the destination site. However, these links will never show up in Webmaster Tools or Site Explorer. They are esssentially invisible backlinks. This is a similar practice used to hide high ranking backlinks from being discovered by competitors. I hope this info sheds some light on these types of SB sites.