Social bookmarking is not something that is new. It has been around for a few years now, and more and more online visitors are using such sites for bookmarking and sharing their favorite sites. That is the primary function of social bookmarking - to keep track of useful and interesting websites, and to share them with family and friends.



To share means being able to post bookmarks publicly. When you use a social bookmarking website, you first need to create an account. Creating an account is free, and will just take a couple of minutes. Once you have an account, you may then add as many bookmarks as you want. There may be additional software available to help you bookmark sites more conveniently (like a toolbar). However, it is not mandatory to install such software. You can just add a link to your web browser to help you bookmark URLs.

It wasn't long before Internet marketers started to target social bookmarking sites to perform SEO. You see, SEO (short for Search Engine Optimization) requires the Internet marketer to build as many inbound links as possible. There are many different ways to build links, and some are easier to execute than others. For example, marketers submit URLs to a bunch of well established web directories in an attempt to get as many inbound links as possible in the shortest possible time.

Some of them then moved on to social bookmarking, with the primary intention getting their sites to rank higher in the search engines. However, because of such practices, the user experience of the social bookmarking sites has taken on a different form. Users are now posting bookmarks not because they like the content or the sites. The bookmarks are there because of SEO.

Now the community doesn't care about SEO. The social bookmarking sites are released to help others find great content. So SEO doesn't really align itself with the goals of the major social bookmarking websites.

In addition, to prevent marketers from manipulating the search results, Google has announced that they will enforce the "nofollow" policy. In other words, all links with the attribute "nofollow" in them will not be crawled, and there will be no benefit whatsoever for these links.

The social bookmarking sites welcome this move tremendously, and soon, most sites started to implement "nofollow" links.

Of course, this doesn't stop the Internet marketers from using social bookmarking to help increase their link counts. This is, after all, the Internet. Everyday, new social bookmarking sites like Masyt are springing up. And the good news is, these sites are still "DoFollow"! For instance, Masyt is a DoFollow social bookmarking site that has already acquired a Page Rank of 1. That means anyone who submit a link to the site will enjoy all the SEO benefits that come with the link.