I have a few questions to those of you using social bookmarks or know a lot about the subject. Is this something that should be used on an actual information packed website that's not a blog? I see two options of benefits here. I wrote a short description and got a free link to my site with digg. I added a digg icon to the bottom of my website that links directly to that article which basically makes it a link exchange, and I don't know that I should have made the digg icon link to that article in the first place. On the otherhand, I could just not link to digg at all and have a one way link so what's the benefit of having the digg icon and link on my site? I happen to think that a line of those would look great above my breadcrumb navigation, but in the end it might not be worth it. Help is appreciated.
The digg icon is for people to vote for your site. When it is voted formit moves up in list so more people see it.
Yeah I went ahead and took it off my site so I'd have one way links. The concept of social bookmarking appears to be very misunderstood. On these forums, I've found people say that it does not improve your rank whatsoever. On the other hand, SEO sites say it gives you a free one way link to help improve your rank. It couldn't hurt in the long run, possibly a waste of time, but that's it.
If your article has been digg by other people there's a possibility that your site can have more exposure to other people. Social bookmarking site can boost your traffic.
The thing with social bookmarking is that it works best to submit - only your best content (most popular) - to the social bookmarking service that best fits your niche - staying within the culture (implicit and explicit rules) of that social bookmarking service. delicio, yahoo-bookmarks and furl allow the addition of as many pages from any URL as you want - and have no way to punish people who put in too much of the same stuff or even spam. Still, even there the effect will be better if you act human and don't submit spam. With stumbleupon, netscape and Digg the effect is better if you have friends > and getting friends interested in your niche(s) will happen only if you don't submit spam and do submit only limited stuff from your own website. Digg has a very specific implicit rules on what to submit and only power-users are likely to get any benefit out of it. Which is why power users are actually getting payed to submit other people's stuff. Stumbleupon and netscape have internal (programmed) rules on not submitting too much from the same website. The precise dynamics are different, but the effect is the same: be social first and don't submit too high a percentage of stuff from your own site.
social bookmarkings help to boost your traffic...google doen't count the as backlinks though yahoo does...
Well, most don't have a high pagerank or trustrank, so the links don't get counted for much. It can help getting keywords associated with your site. But the main advantage of social bookmarking is the social part: getting your site seen - by people that are more likely to be webmasters and link to your site.