Not All Social Media Links Help Page Rank in Affiliate Marketing

In your affiliate marketing career, you may have noticed that not all social media links help the page rank of your site.  You may have spammed the heck out of Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace and wondered why your site isn’t climbing the ranks.  The thing of it is that more and more social media sites won’t count for your page ranking anymore.

Many High Ranking Social Sites Use the nofollow Tag

The reason these seemingly lucrative social media sites don’t count is that they automatically insert the nofollow tag when you post your link.  The reason they did it is simple:  They don’t want marketers to spam their sites with links to boost their page rankings.

So, how does the nofollow tag work?  It’s a tag that’s included with your link in the robots.txt file that tells the search engine spiders to not follow the link.  If the spiders don’t follow the link to your site, your website doesn’t get the link juice.

These Social Media Sites are Still Useful

On a certain level, it’s understandable why they do it.  Their demographic users don’t want to see a bunch of links when they’re reading their newsfeeds and friends’ posts.  These sites are still useful for driving traffic to your site, just not for page ranking by backlinks.

The trick is to have a lot of friends and followers.  Then, you can post your links and get traffic.  The traffic you get will affect your page ranking, but it’s not as dramatic effect as having backlinks.

So, What Social Media Sites Don’t Use Nofollow?

By now, you’re probably saying, “Enough about what social media sites don’t work for backlinks.  Give me the ones that do.”  Fair enough.  That’s what you came here for, isn’t it?  Here is a fairly extensive list of social media sites that you can use for backlinking.

Listible, Furl, Yahoo My Web 2.0, Propeller, Flickr, Digg, Technorati Faves, Slashdot, and Searchles are the top social media sites that you can use for bookmarking.  You will naturally have to handle each one in a different way, but you won’t have that pesky nofollow tag to deal with.

• Listible works because you put a list of your websites (by product) on it.  Then, users can rate and comment on what you’ve listed.
• Furl works in a similar way, but the idea behind it is that you’re essentially creating a favorites list—a sort of classified advertising.
• Yahoo’s My Web 2.0 is more interactive, and you can use it for networking.
• Flickr is a photo-based site, and the way it works is that you upload images from your sites and provide HTML links in the description.
• Digg and Technorati and Slashdot are old favorites for marketing.
• Searchles is a search engine bookmarking site that you can use in multiple ways.  Tags, video uploads, voting, and creating groups are all features of Searchles. Plus, it’s “extra” search engine friendly.