YouTube Founders Acquire Delicious From Yahoo!
What does this mean for your bookmarks? Well hopefully they’ll start to get indexed better. From the press release “Delicious will become part of their new Internet company, AVOS”
If you don’t know Del.icio.us was the first site where you could essentially make your browser bookmarks public and see what others were bookmarking. One of the first social network sites. I’ve always found the service a little clunky and counter intuitive but I know plenty of people that love it.
SEO Implications
I’ve never believed Delicious bookmarks had much of an impact on rankings.In case you’re new here, Google counts web pages that link to yours’ like a vote for your web page. I know there are a lot of cheap services out there that promised all the social bookmarks you can eat to help increase your ranking. I’ve never used them but have tested and used the main social bookmarking sites myself. Some of them can be great for traffic depending on who is bookmarking you but as a backlink strategy I wouldn’t recommend it.
Take a look at Del.icio.us for a moment. That web address sucks right? I had to google it to work out the correct sub domains. Yahoo! is the owner of icio.us so presumably that is a major part of the sale 🙂 . The idea of spelling out a word through a series of sub domains comes from an age when we thought using Java for animation was cool too. The reality (and irony) is that unless you have it bookmarked it is a cumbersome address. The domain icio.us is also extremely noisy. There are hundreds of thousands of pages in the Google index, at that domain that 301 (permanently redirect) to other pages, not to mention the 1/2 million pages at del.icio.us itself.
Hang on a second, only half a million pages? Surely Delicious has millions of users therefore there should be millions of pages. I’d say the Googlebot gave up long ago on trying to make sense on the series of sub domains. My observation is that at the moment, Google cant even see most of the bookmarks let alone count them as a backlink for you. Hopefully the acquisition by AVOS will make it more friendly to the Googlebot . You have until July 2011 to agree to the AVOS terms of service. If you have not approved them before then, your bookmarks will disappear. I’ll be moving mine, just to see how Google handles the transition.You can read the full press release at AVOS.com
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
