For the past few years the rise of social bookmarking as a versatile tool for SEO and marketing has had a huge impact in IM. Yet the wiser IM businesses will use particular bookmark sites as they are intended to be used which is also a method for continued growth and development. So it all just is dependent upon what you want to accomplish in your business. If you haven’t been around IM much, then a bookmarking site is simply just a site where you can place bookmarks on the net. You can assign tags (keywords) to your bookmarks, and that actually has SEO benefits but a lot depends on the particular site.
Google took a great deal of the power out of high PR bookmarking sites when it appeared they (perhaps) let the various sites know that their dofollow link attributes were causing issues. The more well-known bookmarking sites were able to just kill the search results for their bookmarks. Who genuinely knows if Google had any effect over those powerful bookmarking sites and the nofollow relational attribute. But I wouldn’t be surprised if that took place.
Even so there is a lot you can do with certain strategies at these highly trafficked sites. Mass backlinking profiles at bookmark sites are legendary for being just about useless and even spammy. You’ll find a few more strategically minded marketers who take the time and create high quality profiles. Profiles that have appearances of being legitimate will do a better job for you and have a great chance of passing a review. You can market your RSS feed at other places and RSS web directories. Consider the extra benefit of more exposure for your links in those feeds. But you do have to be careful and exercise caution so you are not over-promoting because that could cause loss of members to your feed.
There is a balance that you have to keep with the amount of content and different promotional methods in your feeds. The truth is a lot of IM marketers do not want to spend time with long-term strategic approaches. The higher quality profile approach is something you ought to test out, and you might like the results.