Paid linking… Ever since Google’s recent batch of visible PageRank updates, it’s been the topic on every blogger’s mind. Sure, paid linking a great way to monetize a website, but is it worth the risk? What will become of those who defy the Google gods and continue to sell popularity? After the smoke clears, what sort of brave new blogosphere will remain? Here are some predictions.

Google will continue on the warpath against paid linking. This shouldn’t come as any surprise, since it’s obvious that paid linking is a big threat to Google. It undermines the quality of organic search and takes money away from Google’s own online advertising and website monetization products, AdWords and AdSense. It’s in Google’s best interest to keep fighting it. Their terminator, Googlebot, will only get smarter and more efficient as time goes by, eventually hunting down and penalizing any website that shows the slightest hint of paid linking.

Paid linking will go further underground. No matter how many penalties are assessed, bloggers who crave income won’t be satisfied with AdSense. They’ll hide their paid links within posts, brokering them behind the scenes and blending them seamlessly with ordinary content. This is already happening, so it’s more fact than prediction, but the practice will become much more pronounced. Googlebot will, of course, have great difficulty separating these blended paid links from their non-paid counterparts. In adapting to the new, signal-less environment, it will mistakenly penalize innocent websites, resulting in a backlash from webmasters that will prompt Google to ease off of its offensive.

PageRank will become meaningless. In Google’s attempts to kill paid linking by making PageRank an unreliable measure of link value, PageRank will be the ultimate casualty. Bloggers and entrepreneurs will sense the growing discontent and develop third party measurements to take its place. Eventually, PageRank will be looked down upon as inaccurate, uninformative, and frequently out-of-date, as it always should have been.

Google will demolish trust between link buyers and sellers. Just after the paid linking community thinks is has won a small reprieve, Google will unleash a secret counterattack in the form of voluntary disavowal of links (as they’ve already hinted). Within Google Webmaster Tools, a new utility will be developed that will allow webmasters to remove their own outbound links from ranking calculations, all without ever using rel=”nofollow”. Link buyers will no longer be able to trust that link sellers aren’t cashing in without providing value. Short of adding an unenforceable “You will not disavow paid links” clause to link brokerage agreements, all trust in paid linking as a useful SEO method will be lost.

In the end, Google will emerge victorious. Online advertising will continue and thrive as it always has, and some bloggers may be able to use traffic-based advertising for monetization. For the most part, however, paid linking will be reduced to a shadow of its former self. With the value of paid linking for ranking purposes being next to nothing, paid posting and paid directories will also take a hit. Dejected and crestfallen, bloggers will turn to other methods of blog monetization.

What do you think? Are these predictions accurate? What kind of a future should we expect for paid linking?

It looks like Google used the new year’s eve to update the nominal PageRank around the web. My established websites didn’t experience any fluctuation, but I noticed that many of my recently created niche websites gained PageRank.

Most of them went from PR0 to PR2. I was surprised to see one of them jumping from PR0 to PR3 though, especially because the site is less than six months old.

What about you, did you notice any changes?

Finally, it looks like the frequency of the updates is indeed increasing. The last one was just two months ago (late in October), so keep an eye for the next one around March.

Google

1. Google Chrome’s bookmark sync will be extended to sync the documents stored in Google Docs.

2. Google will launch a service that indexes and ranks web applications.

3. Google will use different interfaces for displaying search results, depending on your query.

4. Google’s search engine will group related results.

5. Google Image Search will let you upload an image and will show related images from the web.

6. Google Street View’s images will become searchable and Google will start to show information about different places in Street View.

7. Google will release an online development environment optimized for building web applications.

8. An open platform for search experiments: tweak Google’s ranking factors, customize the interface and create a better search engine.

9. Android will have more users than Windows Mobile.

10. Many browsers will copy Google Chrome’s features: the simplified interface, the rapid development model, the lightweight extensions, sandboxing, compiling JavaScript code.

11. Google Drive will finally launch, but it will only be an extended version of Google Docs. Instead of sending attachments, you’ll be able to upload files to Google Drive from Gmail.

12. Google Wave won’t become successful, but its features will be used in other Google products.

13. Google will buy True Knowledge and will launch a fact search engine.

14. Gmail’s spam filtering algorithms will be more transparent and you’ll be able to define custom rules for flagging messages as spam.

15. Google Trends will show popular web sites from different categories.

16. Google Desktop will be discontinued and replaced by Google Quick Search Box.

17. If you use Google Chrome, you’ll be able to use the most important features of Chrome OS.

18. Google users will be able to add comments and start conversations if they want to find some information about a hot topic.

19. Google Toolbar will be available for Chrome and Google will start to bundle Chrome with Google Toolbar for IE.

20. Google will buy Spotify and make it available for free.

Next month will be a milestone for me – I’ve been blogging now for around 3 years, and over that time I have to say I’ve learned a bucket load about how content works online, and indeed how content marketing can drive traffic to a website. I’ve watched my own site grow, and enjoyed every second of it, obsessing over the minute details of traffic peaks and troughs, and analysed the traffic and the impact of social media – in a variety of different ways. This post summarises what I feel I’ve learned in those years and how you can apply the things I’ve learned to your own site and strategy to succeed.

1). Content doesn’t matter. Promotion matters

Build it and they will come. Write it and they will flock. Um. Nope. ‘Fraid it doesn’t work like that. You’ll get tired of waiting for traffic to trickle through to your site with  that mentality. Growing a content site on the long tail is a slow and lonely process, and it’s no wonder there are so many newbie bloggers that quit in the first year after not seeing results. You have to get out there and pimp your best stuff to succeed. If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it does it make a sound? If you have great content, and no one is reading it will it generate traffic?

2). Find out where the competition is.
Research on the web using websites like BlogCatalog or MyBloglog to find similar sites.  You can find out who else is writing inside your niche,  and decide if they are delivering content that is similar enough to your own to be considered a competitor; or different enough to be considered a link partner.

Once you’ve created a decent list its trivial to use tools like PostRank or SEMRush to work out what sort of content and/or keywords they are ranking on.  This gives you a basic feel for the sort of thing which is working for them, and indeed what is hot, and what is not.

To find out where they are getting links from, Yahoo Site explorer gives a good overview. Alot of people are still using Google’s link: operator – but this is pretty much dead in the water and no where near as accurate. Analyse your competitors sites and see if there appears to be any low hanging fruit or places where you could get a link also. Build relationships with the link partners – as there may be potential for mutal benefit. With many bloggers now having Twitter accounts this is a great way of tapping into their thoughts and feelings before approaching them.

3). Get your basic seo in order before you do anything.

It’s easy to forget the simple stuff at the outset. On page seo is relatively straightforward, but getting this right at the outset is important, remember that it will be a nightmare to change URL structure down the line, as the most of your links will be lost from around the web if you have to change it. There are plenty of SEO plugins and Marketing plugins for WordPress out there that can help you on your way.

4). People will scrape your content. Embrace it for links.

I’ve made a rule for myself on this site. Don’t publish any articles without at least one backlink to another article elsewhere on this site. This means that if some scumbag does come along and copypaste, firstly I’ll know about it, as the link will either show up in my statistics package, or better again, it’ll pingback to me.  Same story applies for images. In some cases you’ll have the offender over a barrel and can leverage this for a link.

You can use .htaccess to either serve a different image (with a copyright infringement message) – or to display a message asking them to contact you for permission. *Kerching*. All you have to do is provide the image for free, and ask for attribution. It’ll cost you nothing, and increase your traffic.

5). Images create impact. Don’t forget them.
Yes, well written content helps, but supplement with some impactful images and you’ll double the chances (at least) of getting shared by others. Flickr is a great place to find images that are of professional quality. Looking for some impactful images? Use advanced search to search Creative Commons – then sort by most interesting. You can find some wonderful impactful images easily in this way.

6). Exposure, Popularity and Authority matters online

Quickest way to gain authority is via other websites. Period. Even large sites need guest content, and their audience will follow your bio link back to your own website and become subscribers if the content is good enough.

If you are able to build authority everything will fall very quickly into place when you launch any new venture. It’s the reason David Airey was able to build the subscribers on Logo Design love from 0 to over 15 thousand readers in 2 years. It’s the same reason Darren Rowse was able to take Twitip from 0 to nearly 32 thousand subscribers – in one year and 8 months.

Whilst both these guys built up their authority from scratch with their first site, they were able to very quickly scale up other ventures using their existing profile online, and their loyal readers followed them across to their other sites. Love your readers, and they’ll love you back.

7). List posts work – even if they are flakey

List posts are shared more frequently than other types of content. They are easier to consume than paragraph laden prose, and deliver a promise of what is in store for the visitor right from the get go. Bloggers are competiting for visitors attention everytime we hit the publish button, and people are attracted to lists like bees to honey. The down side of list posts is that in the majority they don’t deliver knowledge – instead going with the pretty pictures plus links approach.

This recent post is what I personally consider to be one of the worst pieces of content on my site. Where’s the value? There’s nothing in that post that can’t be found with a five minute google search. It was a guest post, I added the screenshots to it within about ten minutes AND I published at the weekend thinking there’s nothing special about it. I very nearly refused to publish it point blank.

But….I didn’t

It went viral, hit the front page of the Delicious home page, was tweeted 188 times, and has made its way into my popular posts sidebar. If that didn’t prove to me that list posts work, I don’t know what will.  It also taught me that you don’t always know what will work and what won’t.

8). Its ok to link out.
Linking out is ok. Even if your content isn’t 100%, one of the best ways of getting out there is to link out. 5 links out = 5 new visitors if the webmasters you are linking to check their statistics as religiously as I do. They may even leave comments, adding value to your content. Being a closed book that never interacts with other parts of the web is a sure way to remain an island online. Linking out to good sources when you are starting out also helps to build trust with your visitors, as it reinforces that you know how to spot quality material. That trust can then be built upon with your own content.

9). Comments = Community

Community starts with your blog comments. People expect you to respond to them, and either thank them for commenting or answer their questions. Doing so will increase their loyalty to you, and in some case turn them into a subscriber. You have to work hard to continue to build a sense of community around your site in order to benefit from user generated content. It’s the same reason I started a forum.

10). People want to consume content quicker

As I’ve already mentioned, you are competiting for people’s attention with your content. If there’s one service online that proves the point, its Twitter. Making your content easier to consume via email, or by supplementing it with a Twitter feed is a must to aid with this growing trend online.  Summarising the content in your first paragraph before you launch into the main content also helps people decide what to read, and increases the usability of your site.

Headings separate logical parts of your post, and increases the likelihood people will get to the end of your post. Ruthlessly editing your posts, and cutting them down to the bare minimum is also a must.

11). Popular content equals links
Content sharing is the new first step in obtaining links. The social web has provided the mechanisms for sharing content with others. The more something gets shared, the more chance it has of hitting the front page of sites such as Digg or Delicious and ultimately obtaining backlinks. From my own experience Twitter has on numerous occasions been the place viral content gets its first push, which in turn spreads to other social networks.

If you’ve got an audience / lots of subscribers already, this is well and good. Chances are loads of people will pick up on your post, and share it with their buddies. If on the other hand you are a relative no-body – i.e. me – you have to get other influencers to do the sharing for you before it gets any significant traffic. Which leads me to my next point.

12). Websites don’t give links. People give links.

Relationships, relationships, relationships. Building them with people is a sure fire way of obtaining links and traffic.  Finding others within the same niche as yourself and providing content which tickles their fancies will result in backlinks to your site. Sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly via the sharing of your content with other people. Building relationships with influencers on Twitter can help you get in front of a much larger audience and if you can manage to do so, the content you write has a much better chance of going viral.

13). Participate in forums

Forums are the water cooler of the web. People hang out in forums to meet people, chat and more importantly get help / opinion. I have a few forums that I frequent and ask / answer questions at. They are an absolute goldmine for bloggers because they often help spark post ideas. If you find the same questions being asked over and over again there’s a opportunity to craft  a comprehensive blog post on your site, and link to the answer on the forum. The other benefit of forums are the relatioships and authority that can be built within.

14). Most people have no idea what RSS is

If you do ask people to use RSS, you’d better be in a tech related niche, or explain it throughly somewhere on your site. The majority of people will respond much better to the words “email updates” rather “subscribe via rss”  – as subscriptions generally require monetary payment (offline).

15). Social media is not a silver bullet
Social media has been sold by many as some magic bullet for businesses that will somehow increase their business threefold online, and leave them with untold riches. Granted if done right, it can lead to increased exposure, but it’s not a silver bullet. Social media is hard work.

Its slower than some forms of promotion, and requires dedication to build trust and brand BEFORE you can sell to that audience.  Setting up a Twitter account, a blog and a Facebook profile is about 1% of what social media is all about. Having a paintbrush doesn’t make you an artist – It’s what you do ON those platforms that matters – and for it to provide any real value you need to know what content goes where and how to build an audience within each of those platforms.

16). Give away your best content

Guest posting, and giving away your best content is about the greatest thing you can do for your exposure. Think of it like you would giving a talk at a prestigious seminar. When you start off blogging, you are pretty much talking in an empty room – to yourself. Guest posting gets your voice heard by a room full of people; the bigger the audience, the more chance that they’ll come to listen to you the next time that you talk in YOUR room.

17). You have to niche.

If you’ve got a weird interest. There’s a home for you online. If you are into linkbait – there’s a niche home  for you online.

One word of warning. Pick too small a niche, and you’ll run out of things to say. Pick too large a niche, and you’ll just be another blog. For example – if you start a blog about cars, only write about classic cars or super cars. If you run a mommy blog, concentrate on parenthood advice. If you run a tech blog, make it specific to the local economy. You get the idea. Small is beautiful and allows you to focus your efforts on being the best on the web at what you do.

18). Some niche’s are more profitable than others
Yep, when deciding on what you want to write about, you should spare a thought for where marketing dollars are spent online. Travel niche’s are hot, as is anything medical related. The highest paid keyword in the US for Google Adsense is Mesothelioma – and sells for around £99 a click. This is why spammers target you for links, and you’ll see it in WordPress comments all the time. Getting to the top of Google for keywords like this equals serious moolah. Newbie with a spam problem? Akismet FTW.

19). Design matters.

People make decisions about you the minute they land on your site. It takes them 0.05 seconds to work out if your site is visually appealing or not. If you site looks unprofessional, opinions will be formed about the quality of your workmanship, the professionalism of your business, and the content you create. Design equates to trust.

20). Email marketing can drive a shed load of traffic.

Email marketing is worthwhile, and can drive traffic to your site. Start collecting email address from your site visitors as soon as you can. If you’d rather just use your blog as an email marketing engine – feedburner can let you do that easily.

If you’ve got a good baseline of content on different topics, you may want to use the inbuilt feature of wordpress which splits your RSS up into different sections. Running each of these through Google Feedburner can create email newsletters for each of the topics you post about on your blog, which may appeal to certain audiences. You could even use it within your offline marketing material to allow prospects to signup to different segments of your business units.

21). Crafting great titles takes time.
If the early bird gets the worm, then the best title gets the click. Repeat that mantra after me. ) – you should be spending time brainstorming what your post titles are going to be, and thinking about whether ranking for keywords contained within the title is likely to bring traffic in it’s own right. A good rule of thumb is to not sacrifice a great blog post title for keywords, but if you can blend them in seamlessly – that’s great.

22). Never ever launch great content at the weekend

Traffic traditionally takes a dip at the weekends online. People go home, spend time with their families and generally aren’t interested in browsing the web. It’s generally only the hardcore geeks who are still writing blog posts at the weekend.  It makes sense to wait until “business traffic” returns to the web before launching your best content, it will have a much better chance of going viral if you do so. With the majority of social bookmarking algorithms being tilted towards the “speed” something is being shared at, it makes sense to wait until your audience is at full strength, i.e. mid week.

23). Learn how to using Google Analytics inside out.

Google Analytics gives great insight into your visitors – it also lets you work out some extra bits and pieces through the use of advanced segmentation reports. Just the other day I was able to see what my traffic would look like if I lost some of my biggest referrers. It’s also great at seeing market share grow by direct brand searches. Google have plenty of material available online if you want to become an Expert.

24). Twitter is worth it.
I have to admit – I didn’t get it at first – it seems like a waste of time, and narcissitic. I was wrong. Twitter is great for finding and engaging with the local community, and is also great at getting your site in front of an audience. It’s very nature encourages viral and word of mouth marketing and on more than one occasion has been the reason behind some of my content gaining momentum before going viral.

25). Follow up posts solidify Google positions

This is a bit of SEO advice. If you’ve managed to rank on a particular keyword and want to help ensure you stay at the top – write a follow up post, and link through to the original. I’ve done this before to create indented results in the SERP’s – which in some cases puts me at number one and two for some searches – and helps to solidify positions.
Overall I’ve learnt many things over the course, but I can honestly say that blogging works for traffic and business. You just have to know how to harness its power to get its maximum potential.

Source: blog.webdistortiondotcom

If you’re new to Blogging and looking for tips to help you get started, the last thing you need is a blog that only confuses you while you try to learn. What you need is great sites with useful content that provides easy to understand instructions to get you started.

This post will provide you with the names of 5 of the most influential Bloggers In 2009 that inspires and encourages new Bloggers. Therefore, if you’re a beginning blogger you should definitely check out this post.

These 5 Bloggers are some of the most influential Bloggers around that mobilize and encourage their readers to get involved.

These 5 most influential Bloggers were chosen based on their content, the comments readers left, how they interact with their readers and the services they provided.

1. Daniel Scocco: Daniel is an avid Blogger. He has been working the Blogging scene since 2005. Currently, he has a huge readership and a loyal following. This guy knows how to attract readers and keep them interested – In other words, once you visit his blog, you become a fan instantly. If you’re a new Blogger just starting out, you should definitely check out Daniel’s blog at www.dailyblogtips.com. He knows how to engage his readers. He interacts well with his readers. He makes suggestions and asks questions, and answer questions. He maintains a clean and attractive blog that’s very easy to navigate. It’s very easy to find what you’re looking for on his blog. He offers useful tips and free WordPress Themes for blogs.

2. David Risley: One of the main reasons why David is on this list is simply because someone ask him, and he actually sent a reply. That speaks volume. It proves to me that even though he is a successful Blogger, he still takes the time to communicate with a Blogger that is not well known. I also like the design of David’s blog; it’s not difficult to navigate. David provides lots of interesting tips on how to make money with your blog. You can check out David’s blog at www.davidrisley.com.

3. Darren Rowse: You know Darren had to be on this list. After all, just like the previous Bloggers I mentioned earlier, he experiment with many topics on his Blog. Darren sometimes injects personal experiences in some of his posts. He’s definitely one of the most popular Bloggers around today. Darren has lot of comments on his blog. He must be doing something right. This Blog has tons of great information that new and intermediate Bloggers could benefit from. Visit his blog at www.problogger.net.

4. Brian Clark: If you’re someone that enjoys reading good long posts or articles, this blog is for you. Brian and his team of other Bloggers write on a variety of subjects. In other words, there’s always something for everyone. When you get a chance, check out this blog at www.copyblogger.com.

5. Yaro Starak: His blog focuses on articles and pod cast. If you’re interested in learning other ways of marketing your blog, you should visit Yaro’s blog at www.entrepreneurs-journey.com.
He’s a step ahead of many other bloggers.

Credit to: blog.homebiztips4u.com

With LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) being the latest tool in the belt to thwart spammers, LSI has not only changed the way content is looked at but incoming links as well. While having incoming links is important, their effect is now lessened as not just any link will help your rankings anymore. The idea is to build a theme of links to all of your pages, or deep link them.

For example, deep linking to many pages within a website using anchor text that relates to the “theme” of the page is much more crucial than having a bunch of links back to your homepage. Anchor text keywords must also be thematically altered for inbound links to any one page. If this sounds confusing let me try and clear this shit up. Lets say the page you are linking to is about the “flu.” Right off the bat, LSI would determine if the phrase “naturally” occurs within the domain name [ie. www.fluhelp.com]. Next, LSI would look for some variations of related key phrases that could/should be used within the anchor text of the links:

“stomach flu”
“flu symptoms”
“bird flu”
“common cold”
“flu treatments”
“flu vaccine”
etc…

This is not a new practice by any means. Any real, decent SEO has probably been using themed strategies to achieve top rankings for years as the natural theming builds much stronger rankings and content. Most people who are new to the game think these new techniques have derived from the introduction of LSI technology when in fact “themed websites” have just been a closely guarded secret.

Promoting a new blog can be quite daunting, but it doesn’t have to be. As you might expect, breaking down blog promotion into small, actionable tasks eliminates the mental road block you’ve probably experienced when trying to wrap you head around how to get people’s attention. You don’t have to do everything in this list, and some items will have a greater effect then others, but every tactic will at least drive some traffic, and any traffic is better than no traffic.
(more…)

Off page SEO or search engine optimization is doing things off site to improve your sites search engine rankings. The only thing you can do off site to increase your rankings is build up more links. More links will generally lead to better Google page rank and better search engine rankings. When you are trying to get more links you need to think about quality, not all links are created equal and links from low quality sites will have little or no impact on your rankings. The best types of links that you can get are from trusted sources such as universities, newspapers and even some of the top notch directories such as dmoz and Yahoo.

It is sometimes difficult to spot the good links; here are a few questions you should ask yourself when you are looking at sites or pages to get links from:

(more…)

Social Book Marking Sites

The positive effects of social bookmarking for publishers of news sites, blogs and other web sites is outstanding. Social bookmarking can introduce the sites that you own or you like to others with relevant tastes, can drive traffic to your site, and valuable backlinks.

Some social bookmark sites like Propeller.com pass on link juice, while some use the NoFollow attribute. But do not let the use of NoFollow fool you, the search engines are looking beyond the incoming links from social bookmarking sites to gauge their value to their search indexes. The external metadata compiled via user generated descriptions, tags, titles and categorization is incredibly valued by the search engines, as in the same philosophy as anchored backlinks, descriptive content about a web site defined by the users of that site who are not associated with the marketing or coding of that site, can be extremely powerful in gauging the importance and relevance of the content and tags which are used on that site.

Bookmarks show how a site is perceived, and when these sites allow voting, they also show the engines or whatever classification system which monitors voting, how people feel about the quality of the site. Furthermore, social bookmarking can introduce a site to the search engines, as in some cases, people may find and bookmark a site or a site’s internal pages before a search engine can find those pages via another form of inbound link.

125+ Social Bookmarking/News Sites You Should Consider

1. Backflip : Backflip is a free service currently being run by volunteers. Backflip was started in 1999 by Netscape veterans Tim Hickman and Chris Misner. As a research tool, Backflip is clearly of value to the education community, and that community (or at least certain segments) has certainly embraced Backflip. A Google search of sites that contain the term “Backflip.com” results in numerous education-related links, including Teacher Tools.
2. barksbookmarks : BARKS=BookmARKS is a website that combines social bookmarking, blogging, RSS, and non-hierarchical editorial control.
3. BibSonomy :BibSonomy is run by the Knowledge Data Engineering Group of the University of Kassel, Germany. Its specifically designed for researchers, in sharing bookmarks and bibliographies
4. Blinklist :A social bookmarking site launched by Mindvalley. According to their site, they launch several web businesses a year and are focused in 3 areas. – Technology, media and Marketing. BlinkList does have a user friendly interface indicating that its being run well and efficiently. They also quote “fully profitable” on their site. Furthermore, you can label and comment about any web page on the Internet.
5. Blipoo :Meet Blipoo, a social bookmarking site for “cool” people sharing “cool” stories. It claims to help bloggers drive more traffic to their blog because they allow self promotion..
6. BlogBookMark : Designed specifically for Blog hunters, BlogBookmark.com claims to have the hottest news, gossip, and blog chatter from around the web. I highly sugggest that mainstream bloggers bookmark their entires here.
7. BlueDot : This basic social networking service allows users to save and share bookmarks.
8. blurpalicious : Get Blurped! Not too different from other social bookmarks, but I love the tagline.
9. Bmaccess : Social bookmarking with thumbs
10. Bookkit : BookKit.com is an absolutely free web service designed to facilitate bookmark (favorites) management needs.
11. BookMarkAll : Bookmarkall is an online bookmark community where users can create, organize and share their favorite web links online and access them anywhere.
12. Bookmark-manager : Organizer for bookmarks, calendar, diary and knowledge.
13. bookmarktracker : Free online storage, management, synchronizing and RSS sharing of your bookmarks.
14. Bookmax : You can store your bookmarks and links to your favorite sites online and access them from wherever you are : basic Social Bookmarking.
15. Buddymarks : The online personal, group and social bookmarks manager.
16. Bukmark : Bukmark is a social bookmarking website.
17. Chipmark :Another basic social bookmarking site.
18. Citeulike : A free service to help academics to share, store, and organise the academic papers they are reading.
19. Claimid : Manage your online identity. Although this is not a normal social bookmarking site, users can bookmark sites which reference their identity and build backlinks in this fashion.
20. Clipclip : Clipclip allows you to save images and text, with a “bookmarklet”.
21. Cloudytags : A unique word analyzer connects to your page, gets all the words and suggest you the real tags your site is showing to the world.
22. Complore : Derived from com-(with,together) and explore-(search, research). As the name suggests, complore is a vision to connect people from diverse backgrounds
23. Connectedy : Lets you establish a personal link directory online. As you surf the web, you collect links, categorize them in a way that makes sense to you.
24. Connotea : Social bookmarking (for researchers).
25. Contentpop : It has the latest Web 2.0 features such as social bookmarking, blogging & RSS. It also uses the word POP in the title which means it must be good.
26. coRank : coRank is a site where you can share whatever you find interesting on the web with people who value your opinion
27. Crowdfound : CrowdFound is essentially a social bookmarking website, but with a different vision in mind
28. de.lirio.us : Store, share and tag your favourite links. Open source clone of del.icio.us with private bookmarking, tagging, blogging, and notes
29. del.icio.us : THE social bookmarking site : It allows you to easily add sites you like to your personal collection of links and to categorize those sites with keywords. Not to mention that if enough people save your site in a bookmark, it will make their popular page and send a lot of traffic. Delicious is owned by Yahoo and is a MUST for your social media and bookmarking strategy.
30. Diigo : Social bookmarking on steroids.



31. Digg : The social news site that changed the Internet, Digg is a high power authority and a listing in Digg for a site, even if it only has a couple of votes, will rank highly on Google and other search engines for certain terms. If your site is shared and voted upon on Digg, and makes the Digg homepage, you’ll get a lot of traffic and attention from other bloggers who read Digg.
32. Dropjack : DropJack.com is a social content website and owned by the ExactSeek company.
33. Easybm : Allows users to bookmark their frequently visited sites on their private page, allowing 1-click access to their favorite web sites.
34. Enroll : Social bookmarking system based in India.
35. ez4u : Social Bookmarking – Ez4u to Bookmark : “Ez4u to Organize Ez4u to Share with Others Ez4u to Remember”
36. Favoor : Favoor is your personalized new start page. Collect your favorite internet addresses.
37. Folkd : Folkd is a social web-service about pages, news, audios, videos and blogs.
38. Freelink : Freelink.org provides free pages of links that you can access anywhere at anytime.
39. Freezilla : FreeZilla claims to be the first Web 2.0 freebies and promotions social networking site.
40. Fungow : Fungow was designed to help better organize and keep track of your bookmarks.



41. Furl : Like Delicious, LookSmart’s Furl.net is one of the first social bookmarking sites and considered an authority by the major search engines. Listing your sites in Furl will lead to traffic from organic rankings and its popular page drives traffic.
42. Gather : Gather is a place to contribute articles and content, blog, tag and connect with people who share your passions. (Plus you can link out from the articles in this authority site).
43. Getboo : GetBoo.com is yet another free online bookmarking service which allows you to store, edit and retrieve your bookmarks from anywhere online.
44. Google : Allows users to save and create bookmarks in their Google toolbar that can be accessed anywhere online. Google is getting more social by the day, so take advantage of their Google Bookamrks and citations, because one day they probably will have some kind of influence on external meta data considered by the Google ranking algortihm.
45. Hanzoweb : Hanzoweb – Bookmark, tag & share knowledge online
46. Hyperlinkomatic : Hyperlinkomatic – bookmark list manager.
47. i89.us : i89.us offers a free service which allows you to save your favorite website/links at one location that can be accessed from anywhere.
48. Icio : Danish Bookmarking engine.
49. Ikeepbookmarks : Popup feature allows you to add links while surfing the web
50. Iloggo : Simple web based bookmarking tool that you can use for attractively displaying your favorite websites on one page.
51. Jigg : Jigg.in is a socializing community with the latest stories / news submitted by users and has a familiar name
52. Kaboodle : Kaboodle is a 2.0 shopping community where people recommend and discover new things.
53. Kinja : Kinja is a blog guide, collecting news and commentary from some of the best sites on the web.
54. Lifelogger : “LifeLogger is a great way to keep things that matter to you alive and sparkling.” And worth considering in a bookmarking campaign.
55. Lilsto : Lilisto lets you store, manage and find your favorite links (or bookmarks) and removes the need to maintain them through your browser.
56. Linkagogo : Favorites and Social Bookmarking Application, its unique dynamic toolbars automatically adapt themselves.
57. Linkarena : German Social Bookmarking site.
58. Linksnarf : Social link sharing with groups of friends.
59. Listerlister :ListerLister is a social list building community where you can create, add to, and vote for both lists and the items added to them.



60. Ma.gnolia.com : Like Furl and Delicious, anoter major bookmarking site which lets users organize bookmarks, search other people’s favorites and make friends and contacts.
61. Markaboo : MarkaBoo is tool for saving websites, files, and notes from your browser, email or mobile phone.
62. Marktd : Marktd is a reference & voting system that highlights marketing articles considered valuable by the marketing community.
63. Memfrag : memFrag stores your favorites personal notes, making them globally accessible from any computer.
64. Memotoo :Lets users centralize and share your personal data.
65. Mister Wong : Mister Wong is a social bookmarking site that originated in Germany, and has since become a popular and widespread tool.
66. Mixx : An up and coming bookmarking and social news sharing network which should rival Digg, Reddit and others, Mixx blends popular photos, videos and stories.
67. Mobleo : Allows you to easily add, organize, and share your mobile phone bookmarks with your friends using your desktop computer.



68. Multiply :Florida-based social network Multiply, which reports nearly 3 million users and $6 million in funding,opened its social bookmarking site recently and has done well. Definite authority
69. Murl : My URLs is a free online bookmarks manager, think of it as a bookmarks community.
70. MyBookmarks : MyBookmarks – access your bookmarks anytime, anywhere. Free productivity tool for business, student or personal use. Another popular bookmarking site.
71. Myhq : Store your bookmarks in one central location. Fast, text-based, banner free!
72. MyLinkVault : A free online bookmark manager. Other bookmark managers can be so clumsy to use – trying to rearrange your bookmarks can be slow and frustrating.
73. mySiteVote : mySiteVote is a community where you can vote your favorite site/s and view how popular a site is.
74. MyWebDesktop : A collaboration and communication tool, designed to be as generic and easy to use as a telephone and email.
75. Newsvine : The mission of Newsvine is to bring together big and little media in a way which respects established journalism
76. Newsweight :NewsWeight is a democratic news, information, and entertainment resource.
77. Oyax : Oyax is a social bookmark manager which allows users to easily add sites you like to personal collection of links, categorize those sites with keywords.
78. Philoi : Person-to-person link sharing community. Save bookmarks and share links with your friends.
79. PlugIM : PlugIM is a user driven internet marketing community. Submit content, share articles, comment on projects and promote your favorites to the front page



80. Propeller : Formaly known as Netscape, AOL’s Propeller has become a great social bookmarking news community tool which is considered an ultimate authority by Yahoo Search and passes link juice in its news story profiles. Propeller is also going to redesign very soon, which should be quite exciting.
81. QuickieClick : QuickieClick is a second generation social bookmarking website with a visual twist.
82. Rambhai : An Indian social bookmarking community
83. RawSugar : A social search engine powered by user contributions. Its an online community, with over 130,000 URLs already tagged by their members.
84. Reddit : Timely and shocking news oriented, Reddit stories are instantly voted upon and if liked by the community as a whole, can drive incredible traffic and users.



85. Searchles : Owned by the DumbFind search engine, in my opinion Searchles is a much overlooked bookmarking tool and loved by Google, Yahoo and the other major search engines with its passing of link juice and high rankings for terms within search results themselves. Do not overlook Searchles.
86. Segnalo : Italian Social bookmarking site.
87. Simpy [late addition]: Social bookmarking & search, Simpy lets users “save, tag, search and share bookmarks, notes, groups and more.”
88. Sitebar : A solution for people who use multiple browsers or computers and want to have their bookmarks available from anywhere without need to synchronize them
89. Sitejot :Free online bookmark manager. Like every other social bookmarking site, it allows users to manage all of their bookmarks online in one convenient place.



90. Sk*rt : sk*rt is a social media ranking platform of “pure goodness”, targeted towards women. Given the right story, Sk*rt can send A LOT of targeted traffic.
91. Slashdot : The godfather of social news, SlashDot bookmarks are still quite powerful .. keep in mind the site has a heavy slant towards Linux and Open Source issues.
92. SocialDanger : SocialDanger is a Web 2.0 open source content management system.
93. Socialogs : A Digg-like Social Bookmarking Service.
94. Sphinn : Very popular search marketing oriented social news and discussion site run via the Pligg system.
95. Spotback : Spotback is a personalized rating system that recommends relevant content based on personal rating history using collaborative filtering
96. Spurl : Another cherished bookmarking and tagging site, Spurl lets users keep online bookmarks & tags while offering full text searching, recommendations & storing of entire documents.
97. Squidoo :Kind of spammed out, Squidoo is a 2.0 property which lets people and businesses set up a ‘lens’ which lists links, tags and relevant RSS feeds to different subjects.
98. Startaid : I’ve noticed that StartAid bookmark pages rank highly in Google and other search engines. This basic bookmarking service allows users to describe, tag and categorize sites.
99. StumbleUpon : Owned by eBay, StumbleUpon is an amazing blend of social bookmarking, voting, networking, web surfing, search and blogging. Best of all, StumbleUpon can send major traffic with its userbase of around 3 million users.
100. Stylehive : The Stylehive is a collection of all the best products, brands, designers and stores discovered and tagged by the Hive community
101. Syncone : SyncOne is an Internet aggregator of bookmarking and browsing.
102. Tagfacts : Basic bookmarking and tagging, a social knowledge base.
103. Taggly : Store, share and tag your favorite links.
104. Tagne : TagNe.ws is user-submitted, community voted links and resources related to SEO, Blogging, RSS, Tagging, Internet Marketing and more.
105. Tagtooga : Says that this bookmarking engine can be used to discover great sites difficult to find in Google/Yahoo by browsing categories.
106. Tagza : A very young Social Bookmarking site mostly being used by Indian and Pakistani web masters.
107. Technorati : Always changing and reinventing themselves, this recognized authority offers links to blogposts, tagging and a social bookmarking WTF section.
108. Tedigo : Personal and social bookmarking in Spanish and English made simple.
109. Thinkpocket : Lets users pocket websites you find valuable. It is a web service that aims to help store, organize and share your favorite sites
110. Thoof : Thoof is a user generated news and information service that claims to learn about what users are interested in and delivers news that they care about.
111. Totalpad : TotalPad is a new online news and article community where people are free to voice their opinions
112. Urlex : With URLex system users are able to leave a comment regarding any internet link on any site. Possibly good for linking
113. Uvouch : Another basic social bookmarking site, users can save their findings with one click, at one place and access it from anywhere.
114. Vmark : An online bookmark and online favorites manager.
115. Voteboat : VoteBoat is a user-controlled rating and voting site.
116. Votelists : VoteLists lets users create a list of rankable items. Other can add items, comment on them, rate them and more!
117. Vuju : Vuju allows user to submit/publish content which can be tagged and promoted.
118. WeTogether : Social bookmarking site where people will have great opportunities to promote their own sites.
119. Whitelinks : Securely store and quickly access favorite websites whenever connected to the Internet,:
120. Wink : A social search engine where users can share results and answer questions. Users build profiles which can link out to bookmark pages or other web sites (hint hint).:
121. Wirefan : Social bookmarking, news articles submission site.:
122. Xilinus : Organize and manage bookmarks online.:
123. Xlmark : xlmark is an easy social bookmarking site:



124. Yahoo! Bookmarks: The MOST POPULAR social search and bookmarking service on the web. It’s similar to Delicious and something they launched before acquiring Delicious. Yahoo Bookmarks lets users store bookmarks using their Yahoo Toolbar and access them from any computer.
125. Yattle: Bookmark Management and Mini-Blogging Service.
126. Zlitt: Zlitt is a social bookmarking system which gives users the opportunity to share and tag favorite news, images and videos.
127. Zurpy: Saves bookmarks, text clippings, images, files, and news feeds in one place.

Do you have any suggestions of other social bookmarking sites? Please feel free to add them in the comments below.

Why am I posting something about Pinoy Big Brother when I know absolutely nothing about the show? I’ve never watched the show and I’ve never visited their website before today. If you ask me who the characters are, you’ll get a blank stare. I don’t even know why I’m not drawn to the show. I’d rather watch the Soriano guy from Ang Dating Daan and the ministers from Ang Tamang Daan go at it on TV. That’s how much entertainment value I think I’ll get from watching PBB.

But I do know that it’s one hot search commodity. The (Pinoy Big Brother)

keyword has inspired quite a few bloggers to switch niches, albeit temporarily. What would force a solid SEO blog like Macalua.com to suddenly join the Pinoy Big Brother parade online? Traffic, baby. I’m selling my soul to the traffic gods, ergo this post about Pinoybigbrother (I’ll explain later).

The Pinoy Big Brother Parade

Let’s take a look at the Pinoy Bigbrother (I’ll explain this again later) parade of sites that feature information about the reality show:

At number 1, we have the official Pinoy Big Brother

• splash page, hosted at abs-cbn.com. I was expecting to get something better than this.
• At number 3, we have Abe’s monstrous PR4  Sey on Pinoy Big Brother post, with over 20,000 page views and over 250 fan comments.
• At numbers 6 to 8, we have equally monstrous blog posts from garinungkadol.com (138 comments), Manuel Viloria and Rickey (448 comments).
• Sitting at #13 is a cafepress.com affiliate site taking advantage of the, you guessed it, Pinoy Big Brother mania.
• At #18 is Markku’s PBB subdomain. Excellent AdSense blending/placement on that page.

Why do you think people are writing about Pinoy Big Brother? Some are real fans, some on the other hand (like me) are writing for the traffic. And this is where it gets interesting.

(more…)