Will using social submitting/seo marketing tools harm my site in the long run?

Question

I'm looking to drive more traffic to some blogs I maintain. We've had good success with submitting to sites like Reddit and Digg but the process is long and tedious with the amount of content we have. I saw products like Social Submitter and xgenseo that automatically create accounts (scarily xgen also creates dummy yahoo mail accounts and even solves the captcha) and submits articles for you.

The tools seem like an extremely easy way of building up back links on relevant and important social sites without the tediousness of doing it manually. The only thing I'm worried about is that using tools like this will eventually harm my blogs traffic. Does anyone have any experience with such tools or opinions on the subject?

Answer 1

Search engines very much dislike tools that automate anything that manipulates their SERPs. Usually this is limited to tools that set up link farms and repeatedly query their servers. But anything that manipulating their servers potentially leaves you in their cross hairs.

Also, using tools like these is against the TOS of those websites and you may find your IP addressed banned and suddenly you can't use them anymore even for legitimate reasons.

The odds are if you're trowing that many links at sites like Reddit and Digg then you're only producing a lot of noise which will result in those sites burying you quick. You'll be known as a spammer and users of those sites will no longer consider you worth voting up/visiting. Why not just do it the right way? If your content is any good it will be worth the manual submission as it will potentially reap the rewards of the megatraffic those sites can deliver. You can even have your users help you with this by placing the buttons of those sites in your pages.

Answer 2

The search engines are concerned about tracking down these tools and eliminating the links so generated from their results. So the question is whether the makers of the tools can always keep ahead of the search engines. I doubt it.

Answer 3

Using the tools by themselves won't get you banned.But how you use them matter. According to big G, any traffic appears not natural is considered "traffic manipulation". If use these tools to traffic your backlinks, organize your posts, manage your accounts, you are OK. If you blast "junk" using these tools, the end result is probably either getting your site sand-boxed, banned or your posts simply get ignored by the search engines and will not get indexed at all.