Is Digg Dead? Digg Fraud
“A Bulletproof Way To Cheat Digg.”
This post might be a little far away from the usual SEO stuff you find on Pro-SEO, But we thought it was news that any webmaster should be interested in.Getting on the front page of Digg can give your site a traffic spike of tens of thousands, So anyone serious about their site should be looking into writing content that may get that story or article onto the front page of digg via user votes, or "diggs". It's similar to being featured on Slashdot, Which we were when kbox submitted a article about Firefox usage statistics we wrote back in July.
So it's no wonder ,And was only a matter of time, Before someone started taking advantage of this flawed and easily manipulated way of featuring stories on the front page of a highly popular news site.
This is where Spike the vote come in.
Spike the vote are running a community based free website where people digg each other stories. You earn points for digging stories and you can trade these points for diggs of your own stories.
Some people may say this isn't really fair, or even unethical, But hey, This is real life, You can't trust people to play nice when there are website visitors (and money) involved.
How it works
Spike the Vote works on a point system. Each day I give you a mission with several stories to Digg. 20% of your mission involves digging stories submitted by users in this community, while 80% of of your mission is completely random. This is to eliminate footprints and keep things anonymous.
You earn 1 point for each story Dugg. Once you earn enough points, you can trade them in for Diggs on your own stories.
At present you can only sign up, You will then receive an email once spike the vote has 1000 members and then that's when the fun starts.
If digg wants to remain a favorite for millions of web users they are going to have to figure out how to combat this type of "Digg fraud" (yes digg fraud, You heard it here first:p). It will be hard though, Because as the article says, users will be making random diggs to minimize their Digg Fraud footprint. So even if Kevin rose himself joined spike the vote to see what sites are being artificially dugg 80% of the sites he has to digg as part of mission are going to be random stories.
Labels: digg
This entry was posted
on Thursday, October 19, 2006 at 10/19/2006.
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Posted byThe sad thing is I think Digg will encourage this. It's been widely reported that a very small percentage of people are able to control what gets dugg to the front page as it is.
Digg is aware of this and they seem to have no problem with it. Don't forget the more Digg can affect our websites the more we want to be dugg and the more visits Digg gets.
They're making money off this kind of stuff too and sadly I think they're fine even if it means throwing away the basic idea of what the site was orignally supposed to be about.
I doubt Digg is going anywhere soon, but all it would take is someone to come along offering something similar with more relevant articles on their front page.
Posted by
Well, only a small portion of sites can actually get to the homepage of Digg, as only a small group of people control it and they have similar interests. My site and any article on it wasn't dugg at all, for example (however quality site optimization content it has).
I don't think Digg officially approves Digg spamming, as there is a system that gives more weight to those stories, who get dugg by higher profile diggers (I think).
There also is a digg cheating detection system, which also seems to be recognized by the featured site.
In my opinion, Digg is only a fraction of the Web where you can gain your site visibility. If you target your target audience precisely, you won't need Digg, mostly.
That doesn't mean that getting on the homepage of Digg is bad, though.
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