How NOT to Use Social Bookmarking

I just read a great post by Muhammad Saleem over at Pronet Advertising arguing his thoughts on why so many social networking users (Digg in particular) mark every link or post related to SEO as spam. Although I don’t think it’s quite so cut-and-dry as he makes it out to be, there are definately some good points made.

He uses this video to sum up his argument:

This is a prime example of the mindset of many many SEO “experts” in the industry. Not only is “Gary Ruplinger” (the guy in the video – yea I went to his site, shut up) full of ill-conceived advice that will almost certainly get your account(s), website(s), and IP banned from social bookmarking sites, they’re not even good! If you want to take full advantage of the wonders of social bookmarking, write good posts that people want to read and share. Little “SEO tricks” such as the ones mentioned in this video are worthless and will do nothing more than embarrass you in the community.

People who view Digg and other social bookmarking sites as “tools” to be used for promotion and SEO fail more often than not.

Muhammad sums it up:

Like I mentioned before, the Digg community doesn’t have an irrational vendetta against SEO-related sites, it’s just that people like the gentleman in the video above, cause the community to generalize about SEOs and thus label all of them has having the same mentality and using the same tactics.

You can read his full post here.