Hello, Many of the vendors in DP that are offering social bookmarking services are submitting to a lot of Pligg based websites. What is the benefit of submitting a website or webpage to a social bookmarking website that uses a redirect instead of a direct text link to the submitted website? If there are no actual SEO benefit from these redirects, why are these vendors still doing it?
Traffic, theres an issue you can argue. Traffic from these types of sites are a plus, but I agree there is no backlink what so ever.
Believe it or not, social bookmarking websites provides a good foundation for link building. From my previous case studies for 2008, 8 out of 10 webpages that I've optimized using only social bookmarking websites have ranked well.
Social bookmarking is more towards marketing than actual search engine optimization. There was a time before spammers, MFA'ers, etc abused the CRAP out of social bookmarking sites that an actual link was provided directly to the site without the nofollow attribute. Thank the people who abuse these tools for the negative actions they take; yes you reading this are probably one of the abusers!
I agree and thanks to the popularity of DP, the insatiable demand for volume based social bookmarking services could rendered social bookmarking websites useless. Arguably, it's only a matter of time before someone starts a thread about how Google will discount or penalize websites for being listed in certain social bookmarking websites. Let's give it a few more months.
By the way, if you're not already doing it, I highly suggest that you create unique content for your website or blog and submit it to digg.com and del.icio.us. As you have already seen, certain hot topics could make it to the homepage of digg.com within hours. Articles that solves a problem or a top 10 list is highly linkable. Additionally, you could also add non-competing websites within your del.icio.us account to add more value.