Social bookmarking websites are no doubt the buzzword of the recent months. What is social bookmarking? Let’s turn to the definition:

Social bookmarking is an activity performed over a computer network that allows users to save and categorize a personal collection of bookmarks and share them with others. Users may also take bookmarks saved by others and add them to their own collection, as well as to subscribe to the lists of others - personal knowledge management tool [wikipedia.org]

As a site owner I consider these websites as a source of traffic – thousands, in fact millions of users get registered with these websites. There was a recent announcement that MySpace is website #1 in traffic in the USA (though Yahoo! did not agree with the stats). Social bookmarking sites become a considerable source of traffic for those websites that due to some reasons do not enjoy much traffic from search engines. They are also a nice source of extra visitors for the websites that are on top of the search engines.

There is no recipe for attracting visitors from these places. There is a wide variety of types of social bookmarking websites (see the list). MySpace is probably the best known among webmasters. The most common methods to get traffic from MySpace – bulletins, auto-adders and other methods that resemble me of spam. Evidently, not a long lasting way to promote your website. But there are more legitimate ways to brand your website on MySpace.

I would recommend exploring the list and registering with those services that might be a good fit for your website. See what kind of people populate the place, how they interact, what they search, etc.

Here is the list of the most popular social networking websites at this moment to check:

MySpace - Best for: Teens, Young Adults

Bebo - Best for: Teens, Young Adults

Tagworld - Best for: Teens, Young Adults

Orkut - Best for: Young Adults (Brazilians)

AIM Pages - Best for: Teens, Young Adults

Hi5 - Best for: Teens, Young Adults

Panjea - Best for: Teens, Young Adults, Artists

Cyworld [US] - Best for: Teens, Young Adults, Koreans

Tagged - Best for: Teens

Popist - Best for: Teens

Friendster - Best for: Young Adults

Tribe - Best for: Young Adults

Facebook - Best for: College/University students

ConnectU - Best for: College/University students

Yahoo! 360 - Best for: Adults, Middle-aged

PeopleAggregator - Best for: Adults, Middle-aged

MommyBuzz - Best for: Moms!

MuslimSpace - Best for: Muslims

Stardoll - Best for: Kids/Teens

Imbee - Best for: Kids

Dogster - Best for: Dogs; their owners

Catster - Best for: Cats; their owners

Fuzzster - Best for: Fuzzy pets; their owners

BookCrossing - Best for: Book lovers

Boompa - Best for: Car lovers

Spout - Best for: Film lovers

MOG - Best for: Music lovers

Yub.com - Best for: [Online] Shoppers

Yelp - Best for: Anyone in the U.S.

LinkedIn - Best for: Employed individuals; business-folks

biddingBuddies - Best for: eBay members — buyers/sellers

Faqqly - Best for: teens, young adults

[tags]MySpace, Bebo, Tagworld, Orkut, AIM Pages, Hi5, Panjea, Cyworld, Tagged, Popist, Friendster, Tribe, Facebook, ConnectU, Yahoo! 360, PeopleAggregator, MommyBuzz, MuslimSpace, Stardoll, Imbee, Dogster, Catster, Fuzzster, BookCrossing, Boompa, Spout, MOG, Yub.com, Yelp, LinkedIn, biddingBuddies, Faqqly, social bookmarking[/tags]

The generation of the descriptions [snippets] which appear under a page in the search results is totally automated. This generation uses the content on a page plus references to it that appear on other sites.

The source that is used to generate snippets is Open Directory Project (ODP). Many site owners have desire to be to able to request without using the ODP for generating snippets, so from this time on, all you have to do is add a meta tag to your pages.

Use the following tag: META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOODP”

Not all search engines support this meta tag. At the moment Google is the only one that officially runs it.

Google on using this tag:

‘After you added this info to your page, it will take some time for changes to your snippets to take place. Once your pages are recrawled, you are going to see updated snippets’.

To read the official Google article go HERE

[tag]Google, snippets, meta-tag, open directory project, ODP [/tag]

The other day, two big events in the world of Internet happened practically simultaneously. Both Yahoo and Google conducted search engines and ranking updates. Yahoo published information about Yahoo search index update and Google is thought to update its PageRank.

Rajat Mukherjee, official Yahoo representative commented on the update:

“We rolled out an index update last night. As usual, you may see some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages that are included in the index.

Remember, we recently beefed up our online help and resources, and the best way to provide us with feedback is via the online form”.

As for Google, the only thing we can do is wonder and guess. The company didn’t publish any official info, but the changes are definitely taking place. All we can do is wait for explanations or specialists’ comments.

[tag]Google, Yahoo, PageRank, PR, Yahoo search index, Google toolbar, updates [/tag]