Digg has recently emerged as the best way to drive enormous free targeted traffic to your site. Just post great content, Diggers like it, digg it, it gets on the Digg front page and that starts the cycle of thousands of Diggers headed your way, and many more waves of traffics by bloggers and other sites who wish to quote, comment and critique your story. The traffic can be enough to crash servers and hence the need to survive a Digging is essential.
The dynamics of Digg is intriguing. With such a system, there is a tendency of people to cheat Digg to get their stories promoted and get free traffic. The first I can remember is the intense Digg reaction when Digg user KoolAidGuy attempted to game digg.com a year back.
Cheating Digg Friends
Then came Digg Friends, small networked groups of Digg users which promoted each other stories. But Digg has stated that “nothing wrong with digging your friends stories that you enjoy – in fact we encourage this activity through our friends features. It’s our job at digg to ensure that stories are promoted based on a diverse pool of diggers (not just friends)”
Digg has been actively trying to defend digg from spam, artificial diggs, and digg fraud and changed the Digg algorithm a few months back to handle story promotion.They are stressing to have more diverse people digg before it hits the front page.
Professional Digg Gaming
Gaming Digg went professional with dedicated digging services coming in. First was User/Submitter – where Digg submitters pay for digg users ($20 plus $1 per desired digg) to promote their stories and Digg Users make easy money ($0.50 for every 3 stories you digg). Though Digg banned several users, it seems they are still around. Then came Spike the Vote – which works on a point system. Each day get a mission with several stories to Digg. You earn 1 point for each story Dugg which you can trade them in for Diggs on your own stories. I guess they wont be around too long… or maybe not.
Why Digg for free?
Calcanis had offered a deal to top users of social bookmarking services like Digg, del.icio.us, reddit which can help them earn $1000 per month by switching to Netscape (often called a Digg clone). The people who accepted the deal are now the proud Netscape Navigators. The competition among social bookmarking tools is gaining…
Gaming Digg gets tough
Recently Gaming Digg has become more difficult due to a change in the Digg algorithm that requires many more Diggs depending on the category to hit the front page. This will mean lesser stories making the front page, staying there longer and a much larger Digg effect. More reason to get your story on Digg now. Digg top users control a large part of how Digg works, and now share their secret to become a top Digg user.
With the new Digg algorithms in place, I hope the stories I am seeing on the Digg front page are not the result of cheating or gaming Digg. I love Digg and I hope to see the only the best stories featured there…