Social bookmarking lists are sites that let people sort and store shortcuts and bookmarks that link to online resources. Popular examples of these kinds of sites include Google Bookmarks, StumbledUpon, Squidoo, and Reddit, and they include a social networking aspect, which is why they are becoming popular. It is basically a centralized online service where users can share their bookmarks of web documents, as well as edit and annotate them. Social bookmarking lists have been around since 1996, and have popularized some common internetisms such as ‘tagging’. These social bookmark lists are different than search engines in that all the tagging and cataloging is done by humans instead of a computer just searching for words. Presumably, the people doing all of the tagging know the topic of the writing and can use a broader vocabulary than the words on the page to describe what a website or document is like. This is the advantage a social bookmarks list is supposed to have over automated search engines.

However, along with humans comes human error. For example, people who use a site and catalogue the same types of things over time tend to develop a ‘folksonomy’, which entails a specific and unique structure of keywords that aren’t always or even usually candid. This makes it difficult for people outside of the social circle to search for anything within them. It is also more difficult to access certain sites because there is a subscription fee. There are of course free social bookmarking lists in tandem with the paid ones, and users occupy both.

Even so, free social bookmark lists can generate visibility for websites, much the same way search engine optimization can. A free social bookmark list is a way to get your company’s website out on the internet and make it visible to websites without using search engine optimization. It can definitely be used as another way to get more people to visit a website!