March 14th, 2008
The hot topic in the last 12 months has been social bookmarking. We have seen a number of ebooks, courses and products launched focussing on social bookmarking in recent months. One of the most popular and infamous was the Stompernet launch of their social bookmarking membership program that saw a number of social sites change their ’follow’ rules. Similar launches have been Jack Humphrey’s Blackbook update and also a report by SEO 20/20’s Charles Heflin. All good stuff and definitely worth a read.
However as this is definitely ’gaming’ and as the social sites dont want trash, this strategy may become less and less effective. In fact DigitalPoint have recently banned services related to social bookmarking, but not before i had time to test them out.
I chose a couple of services that included stumpleupon book marking and also services to bookmark my site across 100 or so social sites. I did my first round of tests at the beginning of February. The tests included the launch of a brand new site as well as sending traffic to sites displaying adsense.
The new site got traffic very quickly, over 100 uniques a day and sometimes over 200. I was actually selling a product on that site but would probably have made more money by displaying adsense. Summary, high traffic, low real buying visitors.
My adsense sites - ones that are not part of this project and have been around for awhile - did well. Google seemed to refresh its value of my pages within its index, therefore i saw higher Google traffic and better earnings per click. There was no increase in or decrease in CTR, that stayed the same but clicks did increase because of higher trafic.
I have reached a number of conclusions with these tests:
1. Social bookmarking will bring you traffic from their sites.This traffic is just as likely to click on your ads as your existing traffic. These visitors are likely to be ’topic interestors’. They may not be buyers.
2. Google likes these links and will up your listing in its index accordingly, but only for a certain time frame - i saw my rankings drop back again after about 10 days. However my search terms are very competitive so a longer effect may be seen with the long tail.
3. The effect of bookmarking on your google indexed pages only works for sites that have been around for a longer period of time
4. Google undoubtedly gives you better EPC if your traffic is coming from their index.
5. By using channels in Adsense i am able to look at where my high paying clicks are. If those pages are not getting a lot of traffic i can use the bookmarking strategy to do 2 things: 1> immediately get traffic into those pages to get more clicks 2> get more one way deeplinks from authority sites these will have a temporary positive effect within google.
I discovered one of my channels - a directory within one site - was getting huge click value, but low impressions. So at the start of March i did another round of bookmarking to see if i could get more money and better traffic from that channel. At the time of writing - 2 weeks after doing the bookmarking - clicks and revenue are up in that channel and the cost of the bookmarking has been returned. Based on the February test, i should expect to see better increases in the last week of March.
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