You have to be carefully who you are linking to because it happens for sites to change their profile. In most of the cases old expired sites get brought by people who drive them using black hat techniques in spammy sites which finally gets banned or penalized.

Links to banned or penalized sites might induce a penalty for your own site and this is named bad neighborhood.

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I’m compiling a list of Social Media Digg Clones sites containing the best resources for Internet Marketing Niche: SEO, SEM, SMO, Online Advertising. Here are the sites you might use to find the top stories and to share your favorites stories:

• Alexa Rank: 173,538
• Google Pr: 6
• Pages Indexed by Google: 57,500
• Pages Indexed by Yahoo: 161,633
• Backlinks(According to Yahoo): 59,517

Plugim.com

• Alexa Rank: 69,317
• Google Pr: 3
• Pages Indexed by Google: 14,700
• Pages Indexed by Yahoo: 20,594
• Backlinks(According to Yahoo): 18,741

seovoter.com

• Alexa Rank: 155,105
• Google Pr: 3
• Pages Indexed by Google: 1,840
• Pages Indexed by Yahoo: 78,49
• Backlinks(According to Yahoo): 2,855

earnersclub.net

• Alexa Rank: 170,041
• Google Pr:0
• Pages Indexed by Google: 14
• Pages Indexed by Yahoo: 549
• Backlinks(According to Yahoo): 753

ppcad.com

• Alexa Rank: 463,207
• Google Pr:2
• Pages Indexed by Google: 2,330
• Pages Indexed by Yahoo: 597
• Backlinks(According to Yahoo): 73

seoyak.com

• Alexa Rank: 782,856
• Google Pr:2
• Pages Indexed by Google: 895
• Pages Indexed by Yahoo: 2904
• Backlinks(According to Yahoo): 440

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Everyone wants to reach the first page of social bookmarking and social sharing sites. On the other side there are many people describing that being on first page of digg or similar sites don’t have long term effects.First of all, reaching the first page of an important social bookmarking site will bring a big crowd on your site, only for a few days. It will not result in a constant traffic for long periods of time, as a direct effect of being on the first page, but it might generate indirectly traffic on long term. A few guidelines should be taken in consideration.

Webpage Factors

When you reach the top on a SMB the webpage will be noticed by the crowd. This is not enough if you want more than many visitors for a few days.

• The page must be really useful to make the visitors come back to the site and convince them that it’s something that deserves to be shared to the community. The page should contain useful content that is hard to find or unique.

Website Factors

When you reach the top on a SMB the site will be noticed by the crowd. To benefit on long term you must ensure that the visitors will remember it:

• the entire site have relevant and useful content.
• the similar content should be visible, observable and accessible to the user in a matter of seconds. The pages where the visitors might roam directly from the landing page should be relevant to what they are looking for.
• the layout and design of the site of the site is crucial, even more important than the content. The first impression matters, and if the first impression is not good there might not be a second one. The site should look simple and clean to be understandable from a single look.
• the site should be brandable with a visible logo. When visitors land for the first time to your site, they should feel it’s unique. If you don’t want to buy a unique theme then you should use one which is not very popular in your blog niche.
• have accessible social bookmarking and sharing buttons for more sites. Once a page reach the top in one SMB other will follow. It’s better for the visitors to have an accessible way to vote one page on other social media sites.

RSS and email subscribers

Depending on how good you content is a percent of the visitors might subscribe by rss or email. A few techniques will increase the percent of visitors subscribing:

• have a visible rss button
• have a visible subscribe by email controls
• have a regularly updated site, but not to “regularly ” – I personally avoid blogs having too many posts, but I read that users like blogs updated regularly. From my point of view I’m not annoyed and I don’t unsubscribe from a blog having a post per month but I avoid those filling my reader with many irrelevant posts daily.

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For more details see the forums discussions: DigitalPoint Thread, Google Webmaster Help.

I think that directories submission is one of the myths that are sustained by the directory submission services seo companies. At this point there are thousands of directories. From those only a few has a good page rank and only 2 of them I consider important:

• ODP – Open Directory Project (dmoz.org) – a directory maintained by volunteer reviewers, where a website might be approved for listing even after 6 months after being submitted.The main advantage of the open directory project was the fact that many directories are based on it and a link published in ODP can generate many backlinks. The ODP was usedby google to rank websites.
• Yahoo directory – a paid directory which is not cheap (299$ a review fee + 299 recurring annual fee if accepted for listing).

IMHO the google move of ignoring directories is to a certain degree the correct one, because the directories are not used by potentianl visitors to identify the sites they are looking for. I just took a look on Alexa and here are a few figures I consider important:

• The number of visits to ODP gets lower and lower. In one year it went to 30% from the last time when checked.
• Some other notable fact is the percent of ODP visitors are going to editors.dmoz.org. So 12% of the trafic is made by visitors.
• Compared to digg.com only a small number of visitors are using ODP.

Considering all those is obvious that ODP is not used by so many users and that those days people are using other ways to find what they need. ODP moves to slow to review new links and for this reason google tends to give a better weight to social bookmarking sites like digg.com

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The most simple SMO techniques used by everyone are:

• embedding “digg this” like buttons into websites to increase the linkability
• providing RSS feeds
• embedding resources from large community sites like youtube
• blogging, as a social activity

Social Sites can be considered:

• Social Networks
• Social Bookmarking Sites
• Video and Photo Sharing Sites
• Blogs with social aspect
• Micro Blogging sites like Twitter
• Friend Feed
• Blog Search Engines

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The benefits can not be ignored:

• The improvement even for a limited amount of time will add new visitors to your site, boosting the income for a few days.
• Some visitors might bookmark the site in some other social bookmarking sites or they can add incoming links to your page.
• The search engines will detect new content and will index it faster.

There are many people adding their new content in social bookmarking for those reasons. This might be a good technique, because most of the users are willing to give you their vote, but are to lazy to add a page on their favorite social bookmarking site.

There are websites which can be used to mass-add pages to Social Bookmarking Sites. You can use one of those:

• socialposter.com – can be used to easily submit pages to up to 160 social and bookmark sites
• socialmarker.com – similar to socialposter it is updated with a list containing most of the search engines.

Personally, I’m not using those websites, but I intend to do it, only for the posts that look extremely interesting and viral.

A few updates after I published this post, from Chris Lang through the first comment(scroll down and read it). I’m not sure about that information, but I’ll think again before using social bookmarking submitter software .

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