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Friday, December 30, 2011

What is a Social Bookmarking Site?

Social bookmarking is a way for people to tag, share, organize, store, and search for useful links online. Instead of saving sites as bookmarks or favorites in your browser, you compile them online into a website you can reach from any computer. These bookmarks reference noteworthy links and can be private, public, or shared within a specified group.

Bookmarks are tagged for ease of search; for instance, you can tag a recipe site with "food," and bookmarks set to public can be searched by other readers. Once a site is bookmarked, the item can be voted upon with a like, thumbs up or thumbs down, or other voting criteria. Each different site has a unique community element to it, with nicknames for their users, such as a "Redditor" on Reddit.

Bookmarking can be used as a Search Engine Optimization tool, making the website where the article appeared more visible. Some sites pass on link juice, others use noFollow attribute .Social tagging, also known as folksonomy, is a process by which users add metadata and keywords to shared content. Social bookmarking sites are often a target of spam, which makes tagging a valuable step for weeding through the poor quality content. Social bookmarking sites have helped many lesser known sites become discoverable to a larger audience, particularly when bookmarks are shared on other social media sites.

Depending on the website, you can bookmark articles, news, images, video, or other miscellaneous content. Some of the most popular social bookmarking websites are Delicious, StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, Xydo, and Pinterest.