Welcome to the third part of our series on good and not-so-good link building methods. If you missed the previous episodes, I suggest you catch up here:

• Part I: Guest posting and theme distribution
• Part II: Crowdsourcing (running a contest) and directory submissions

In this article I will discuss the pros and cons of social bookmarking and forum posting as means of obtaining inbound links.

Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking used to work like a charm back in 2008 when you would have got an instant and major boost in SERPs only from a handful of submissions to sites like Digg, Stumble Upon or Reddit. However, with the increased popularity of open sourced scripts like Pligg, Scuttle or Drigg, everyone can build a social bookmarking profile these days, so their usefulness has faded somewhat. Social bookmarking is still a great way of getting fairly strong backlinks, as well as some targeted traffic.

• Difficulty: easy to medium. Submitting to the popular social bookmarking sites isn’t rocket science – you have to sign up, confirm your email address, plug in your site details and hit submit. However, once you decide to scale up your link building campaign, you will find that getting a larger list of quality sites isn’t as easy as it seems.
• Time consumed: Little if you only plan on submitting to a handful of sites, but can get quite time consuming once you scale up.
• Quality: medium to high. If your site is interesting and worth spreading around, a lot of people will link to it and the viral effect will kick in. If your story gets enough votes and you get on the front page of popular social bookmarking sites you can expect more traffic than your server can handle (unless your hosted with us!).

To have a better chance at getting your link spidered fast, use a custom tag on low popularity social bookmarking sites (something like your company name). If you submit a handful of quality stories, there is a chance that your tag may get featured on the front page, so all your links will be one link away from the site’s index.

Forum posting

A lot of forums allow you to post clickable links in your signature. This method can be extremely tiresome, since you would actually need to get involved in the community and post insightful messages. Don’t do it unless you really enjoy being a member in that forum.

• Difficulty: hard. Once you join a new forum, you will need to spend some time to learn what the community is about, what their standards are and how the posting etiquette works.
• Time consumed: a lot.
• Quality: low. For every post you make, you will get a link that is going to be on a page with lots of outbound links (assuming all other forum members have links in their signature), so the juice passed to your page can get quite insignificant.

As a final piece of advice: if you consider outsourcing your forum posting tasks, keep in mind that once the job is done and you have paid your freelancer he or she might change the signature to point to another client’s site. That’s one of the reasons why Google doesn't think very high of forum links: they are not permanent, and they are artificial. Google usually looks for links that you did not initiate yourself directly above others.

This concludes our third part. Stay tuned for more tips.