Interesting article today published here about Google’s attempts to curb rampant social bookmarking activity to a particular site or page. Wary of bookmarking spam, Google intends to penalise any detection of ‘un-natural linking activity’ it sees from two of the major social bookmarking sites being Digg and StumbleUpon.

Google’s spokesman, Jeff Waltz says…

“We are working on strategies to level the playing field, effectively bringing back natural search patterns enjoyed in the pre-social bookmarking days. For webmasters who use social media responsibly, this is nothing to worry about - we will be targetting mainly a small minority of prolific bookmarkers with a new algorithm that looks at linking patterns over time.

Webmasters who rely heavily on bookmarking their own sites to gain traffic will likely see a drop in pagerank before the end of 2008, and we will be working closely with two major social bookmarking sites to find a solution that will have no detremental effect on the average internet user.”

The original article appeared on Google Blog but was later taken off but the cat is out of the bag and will be implemented soon. How Google will be able to recongise the difference between a story which generate rapid buzz and a spammer is anyones guess but Google obviously sees social bookmarking as a threat to its service.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 18th, 2008 at 10:15 pm and is filed under Google, Social Bookmarking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.