Seeing your site on social bookmarking sites (Digg, etc.) does of course increase your hits for a certain period, but can it also increase your PR? Digg and Delicious both use the bloody nofollow tag on their links, but does any of the social bookmarking sites give your site credit for any linking?
If, they are no fallow then your PR will not increase backlinks from them, but still it is usefull as u get traffic.
It will not increase anything but the traffic for the time that the link is active/front page/popular. The point is that digg for example has the URL for your site's description ranking in google and they do not want to give this away. But in any case, traffic is good, no?
Usually it will not be worth using time to add your website to digg, etc. unless you are pretty sure it will become popular and thereby stay on the frontpage.
SEO and SEM is so closely related so improvment in one of the will also help you in the other area as well.
Are you sure google doesn't use them as an indication your site isn't spammy? From results I have seen I would say that del.icio.us links can help.
Social bookmaring networks are good for link baiting if you have good content. Then if link bait happens, you will get thousands of links
Link placed within the social network itself is technically "not worth a single penny", you can manage it yourself and not wait for anyone to submit your article instead of you (that´s not spamming, that´s marketing ). The real power of social bookmarking site is that there is a community of people reading it, digging (on digg, you can replace it with the specific verb based on social network you wanna use) it and looking for relevant content to quote, praise or bury underneath in their own blogs/sites. That means that one link in delicious or digg - even though it doesn´t help you increase your PR - can result in tens or hundreds of crawlable links outside of the social bookmarking site.
Also you're forgetting about all of the secondary links that a listing on a popular social network sites bring. Lots of people blog the stories that they read on Digg, so you can pick up 100's more links from related blogs.
I've found Digg a great source of generic traffic. Surfers reading articles I've posted. Can't point to any PR boost as the site is young but it's helped score a few IBL so no doubt there is value to it. As with most SEO its about the content you deliver.
Also, if you are getting traffic from popular Digg and Delicious posts, then you are more likely to get linked to from the viewers ?.?.? Regarding Reddit. One of my bookmarked posts ranks for my keywords and gets me traffic.
Would anyone consider helping me with my site and if so how much?... I need someone who knows what there doing to sbumit articles to digg and help include my site in social bookmarking. Pm me if you can help.
Sorry, I misread your question previously. I agree with this statement completely. The link bait will draw more backlinks long after your site has moved from Digg's front page. The people who are getting the best traffic are those creating original content. I will see if I can find the article but I recall reading that on YouTube the split between content creators and content aggregators and viewers was like 95 to 5.