Why Social Bookmarking is dead

I'm pretty new to the affiliate and internet marketing game as I've only done for a year and a half, but in my time I have seen some very effective tools and processes, and some monumental changes in what works and what does not.

Since most of my work is based on building websites and getting traffic 'organic' from Google (also known as SEO marketing) I like to keep up with new developments in the search engine's algorithm ( the thing that measures how sites rank where) and what works and what does not. Around March 2009 I bought a tool called Bookmark Demon, which allows you to socially bookmark a page that you did (whether it's a blog post, a simple website or a full content domain) to about 100 sites.

This tool worked great, because you can do it anonymously and quickly, with only a few images captcha to fill early. The best part was simply filled in all your login information for each site at the start, and then you could bookmark sites almost unlimited thereafter.

For some months I have seen great results with my sites, and had many of my pages ranked in the top 5 search terms for competitive enough without much work at all. The sites that were being built were simple enough and, apart from a content page only had a privacy policy and terms and conditions page. Fast forward to the end of 2009 and I tried running the process exactly the same with nowhere near the same level of results. It seems that Google has finally broken tools like these, and put an end to the fun .......