Social media marketing - Google bookmarks

Social media is a large concept, and it includes much more than Facebook and MySpace. Technology has provided us with an ever growing abundance of tools with which to share opinions, photos, links, and bad jokes. Using social media tools for marketing is a statement of purpose, without dictating any specific tactic or tool.

The social bookmarking services online, and there are several, are clearly a form social media technology.  They provide a means of sharing links and comments with a cohort of friends, and with the world.  The sharing itself is a form of organic viral marketing at its best.  Internet marketers do what they can to encourage this type of link sharing as a means of increasing web site traffic.

However, the assumption I stated recently about social media data extraction is that the social bookmarking services use the linking data collected as a means of refining the relevancy and importance of a web page (the link) for search engine purposes.  In short, I assume that Google examines the link data and bookmark comments collected by Google Bookmarks in a way that influences search results.

This is an untested hypothesis, and even if true there is a possibility the influence could be negative.

As an exercise I used Google Bookmarks' fairly new list feature to create a cross-domain site map for this blog. on small business internet marketing. The Google Bookmark feature that allows this is capability to divide the bookmark link list into titles sections.  These are the sections I created:

• Search optimization
• Webmaster tools
• Internet marketing legal issues
• Site optimization
• SEO resources
• Social media marketing
• Structured data

All of the links in the Google Bookmark list are to a single sub-domain (micro-enterprise.blogspot.com), which is not one of Google's favorite things.  Yet, the comments I have begun to add to the bookmarks on the list are original and laced with mostly relevant keywords that don't over do it, or so it is hoped.

The linked to this Google Bookmark list uses the text "small business internet marketing."  The list itself is set to 'public,' so anyone should be able to access it including the various search engines.

The first unanswered question that must await unfolding in time is whether Google Search will index the bookmark link list and comments.

Other resources on Google Bookmarks are:

Official Google - requires account login
Wikipedia on Google Bookmarks
Unofficial FAQ dated March 3, 2007

Tom Fox
Louisville, Kentucky
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