Rumour has it that Google is going to team up with Digg to punish people who continually submit their sites to Digg just to get a PR boost.
A lot of people think the rumour is false but it is interesting nonetheless. Links from Digg are not editorially given - it’s pretty much just a free for all - so there is no reason for Google to count them.
The only time a link should count is when it hits the front page. Perhaps Digg should be nofollowing all the other links?
Remember that the aim of Digg isn’t to get links from Digg, it’s to get links from Digg readers websites.
Digg has created a new algorithm that appears to be making some stories submitted by top users need hundreds of Diggs to hit the homepage. The algorithm looks at the diversity of people who Digg your story so if 200 people who always Digg your stories vote for it they count less than if 40 people who have never voted for your stories Digg it.
The problem with this is that sites like Subvert & Profit will be able to push stories amongst their 10,000 users and easily hit the homepage because of the diversity of the Diggers.
The worst thing about Digg for anybody apart from the top users is how hard it is to hit the homepage. If this is now easier the masses will be happy but the more vocal top users brigade will be quite upset about the issue.
Meanwhile Subvert & Profit will thrive.
Today the full extent of the Digg bury brigade was revealed. Some stories are getting almost 500 buries!
Why anybody feels the need to bury something just because it doesn’t align with their view of the world is beyond me. One of the most buried stories actually turned out to be true just a few hours later which is ironic.
I can understand stories being buried when they are in the upcoming queue but is there really any point in burying something on over 1000 Diggs when it’s clearly popular with most Diggers? A lot of bloggers get frustrated when their story gets buried but this data just shows that everybody is being buried but if you have hundreds of stories per week being submitted the chances of hitting the homepage are much higher.
Don’t put all your eggs in one basket, write multiple stories per day and you stand a much better chance on Digg.
Just checking through today’s top stories on the Digg homepage and I noticed that Engadget’s story from today’s Apple event in London was followed 2 hours and 50 minutes later with a summary post focusing on the main news from the event; Apple iPhone hits O2 in the UK on November 9th.
While it’s unlikely this is intentional it is a very clever linkbaiting tactic and goes to show the power of a title headline in Digg. Engadget have essentially split the same story into two articles both with a different angle to give the Digg audience what they wanted to read twice, getting double the amount of homepage coverage, traffic and possibly links too!
Everyone always talks about how SEO’s manipulate social media websites such as Digg in order to potentially gain hundreds of natural inbound links from the huge amount of traffic generated from promoted stories. Seeing that SEO’s are getting quite a bit of stick I thought I’d take a look at this from a slightly different angle and by analysing some of the inbound link stats Digg aren’t doing too badly themselves!
A story which made the Digg homepage last week from TechEBlog titled top 5 Google tricks was arguably a piece of content crafted specifically for the social media audiences. But linkbait or not the story was successful and what I found particually interesting was that while this generated 725 inbound links the actual Digg story also gained a similar total with 688 links.
So for every pathetic SEO who profits from Digg (I won’t link to the original source of this video as he doesn’t like linkbait!) the link juice seems to be shared fairly evenly, also benefiting Digg very nicely too. Looking at the overall inbound link totals in comparison to some of the sites whose stories regularly appear on the social media homepages and unsurprisingly there’s a massive difference:
Digg - 80,581,285
SEOmoz - 512,025
Pronet Advertising - 198,313
Tropical SEO - 13,803
It would be impossible for any SEO to replicate anywhere near this level of links generated as several hundred new links are being added to each Digg version of every promoted story, so essentially Digg are getting there own linkbait projects for free!
