The worlds largest webmaster forum has this month banned members from exchanging votes on sites such as Digg and StumbleUpon.
Most people are happy about the ban while some members either don’t understand it or want the ability to exchange votes reinstating.
Exchanging votes in public is a very bad idea and sites like Digg have been banning sites and users for around 2 years now. They used to have moderators scanning DP threads and banning urls almost in real time. Later on they switched to just checking referrer data and flagging stories for manual review if they found lots of visitors from the forums.
The main issue was that the stories were all of very low quality and had all the hallmarks of spam so it was easy for sites like Digg to start taking harsh action.
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!
After reading Pronet Advertising’s post today about making your content delicious I was inspired to add Digg and Del.icio.us buttons to this blog. It took me a while to find all the information I needed to create both buttons so I thought I’d write about the process here.
I found that most recommended methods of adding a Digg button doesn’t actually work which I found surprising as it’s used by blogs such as SEOmoz. This is by using http://www.digg.com/submit?url=INSERT_URL which sends you to the submit page but doesn’t include the appended url of the story your submitting. As a workaround I inserted the same URL used by FeedBurner which skips to the second phase of submitting a Digg story and inserts the URL and title. Below is the code used for Blogger, if you use different blog software you would obviously need to change the way the URL and title is written.
I also added these links to the RSS feed which was made very easy by FeedBurner, all I needed to do was activate the FeedFlare service and select the links I’d like to publish such as Digg, Del.icio.us and Email This.
WebProNews have posted a PPC advertising video with Andrew Goldman from SES Chicago. Also from the same conference, they’ve added an excellent video about the do’s and dont’s of Digg with Neil Patel and Todd Mailcoat.
I’ve just received an email, below, to promote a Digg story. Social bookmarking is obviously a very successful method of promoting a website but its amazing the lengths some people go to for a few extra Digg votes. I’m actually quite interested in seeing how successful this particular entry is, it currently has 1 digg and I’m guessing it won’t get too many more!
“new antivirus software.
If your computer has been suffering from frequent crashes,instability or slow PC speeds, you may have critical errors on your computer.
http://digg.com/software/Very_popular_antivirus_software
to make an observation: support@softwarepro.com”
