If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Today I am not going to be writing my own post but rather share one with you that I found really useful and I think that you would to. Some time ago I did some research about social bookmarking sites and how valuable their backlinks to your site are. The reason fir this is that I have been using quite a few social bookmarking sites at that stage and noticed that a lot of them provided nofollow links back to your site.

So as I was searching I came across a very interesting post. This guy did a test on +-250 social bookmarking sites to see which ones are actually worth getting backlinks from.

So this is how the guy did his criteria when he tested all of the social bookmarking sites:

Quoted from his site:

Google PR on The Home Page - I decided to give each site 1 point if that site had a Google PR of a 4 or higher on the main page of the site. The real value of published PR numbers is very questionable but it does give us some indication of link value. PR4 simply seemed like a reasonable expectation for sites like these to achieve.

Google PR on the Sub Pages - This is another area where I just had to pick a number and go with it. I simply checked the main sub pages of each site to see if any were at least a PR3. Reason being that it may give some indication of how well the site passes link value on through its internal links. This is important because even if you make page one you won’t be there for very long. If the site had at least one PR3 sub page it earned one additional point.

Does the Site Use PermaLinks - By this I mean when you submit content is a specific page created on the site just for that content. This is one of the most critical factors in my opinion so if the site uses permalinks it got two points. There reason there is so much value to this is it will allow you to build additional off site links to your posted content and build even more link value.

Does the Site refrain from using NoFollow or Redirection - If not, the site does not even get on the list; but to round out my scale to an even 10 star system each site gets one point for this critical component.

Is the Alexa Ranking 10K or better - This list is not about driving traffic at all, only about link value and building back links with it. Yet if a site has high traffic volume it will continue to gain more and more of its own links and build power. Hence a site with a 10K or better Alexa rank was given one point due to the fact that link value on the site in theory should continue to rise.

Does the Site Use Anchor Links - This is another very critical factor in link building and on some levels it matters a lot more then the raw value of the page that provides the link. Some services give you a link that begins with http://. Such links are no where as near as valuable as a link that is formated with anchor text under your control. So each site received or lost two points for this factor. This factor alone dropped Propeller from a 10 to an 8.

Is the Domain over Two Years of Age - There are two primary factors at play on this one. First in theory an older site should have more “trust” to pass on then younger sites. Perhaps more important though is that an older site is less likely to pull the old switch-er-oo on you. Here is what I mean by that. Many social sites start out giving you great links to get a lot of submissions at first. Then one day switch to redirects or nofollow to horde link juice, an older site in theory should be less likely to do this. This is in no way perfect so only one point was given based on this factor.

Are more then 10,000 pages from the site indexed in Google - This is another one where I just had to pick a number, but 10K seemed reasonable for these types of sites. I dropped down to the 1000th result to check for supplementals and left it good at that if they were still showing valid content. One point was awarded for meeting this goal.

At the end, this is a list of sites and how they scored in each category:

I hope you find this post as useful as I did. If you’d like to read the whole article you can click here