What happened to bookmarking
The original bookmarking sites let anyone post a URL, which made them a link source and then made them a spam target. Most responded by making outbound links nofollow, closing to new accounts, or shutting down entirely. The long lists of bookmarking sites still circulating are mostly a record of sites that no longer exist.
What replaced them are platforms where a submission competes for attention. On those, a post either gets traction or disappears, and that filter is precisely what makes them worth something.
The platforms that survived
Reddit, Hacker News and their equivalents are bookmarking in structure: a user submits a link, others vote. The difference is that submission is not the achievement. A link posted to a subreddit nobody reads produces nothing. A submission that lands can bring more qualified traffic in a day than a year of directory listings.
They also punish self-promotion harder than any other channel. Accounts that only submit their own material get filtered, usually silently.
If you are going to use them
- Participate first. Comment for weeks before you submit anything of your own. Every one of these communities can spot a fresh account promoting a domain.
- Submit other people's work. A submission history that is entirely your own domain is the pattern that gets accounts shadow-banned.
- Match the community. The niche communities are more forgiving and more valuable than the large general ones, because the audience is the one you want.
- Expect nofollow. Treat these as traffic and awareness channels. If a link happens to pass authority, that is a bonus, not the plan.
What we have catalogued in this category
Our own dataset holds 19 platforms of this type. 74% of them pass a following link, and 95% are ones a beginner can complete without prior accounts or a verified business.
| Market | Platforms |
|---|---|
| 🌍 International | 19 |
Counts describe our catalogue rather than the web as a whole. We publish the numbers, not the list: the list is the product.
Examples of this kind of platform
Names most practitioners would recognise, to make the category concrete: Reddit, Hacker News, Flipboard, Pocket, Mix.
Common questions
Do social bookmarking sites still help SEO?
Not directly, in most cases. Almost all mark links nofollow. The indirect effect is real: a submission that gets attention leads to visits, and sometimes to links from people who saw it.
Are the big lists of bookmarking sites useful?
Mostly not. Check any such list against reality and a large share of the domains are parked, dead or closed to new accounts.