Either someone at the Web Advertising Blog is gaming the social media sites, or the bar on quality has dropped to fantastically low levels. Making its debut on Digg and del.icio.us/popular today was this absolute stinker - How to Promote Your AdSense Niche Site.
From the piece:
Work on your Search Engine Optimization. Learn about on and off page optimization. Learn about keyword density, image alt tags, meta tags and link popularity. Search Engines are going to be a huge asset to driving traffic to your site. With a little effort you can find your niche site in the top 10 keywords.
Start a reciprocal link campaign with other web sites in the same niche. Trade links or simply ask for a link to your site. You can do this for free with a links directory script to manage your links.
Not only is the advice misguided and misleading (keyword density? reciprocal link scripts?), it's overly generic, poorly written and, in the end, useless. Yet they probably received 30,000+ visits today and Technorati is already counting up the blogs linking in.
I can't prove it was spam, but I really hope that's the case. The alternative - that the readers of Digg & del.icio.us actually enjoyed the post, found value therein and wanted to share it, is too scary to contemplate. It makes no sense to me because some previous posts at that blog like this one on increasing feed subscribers and this one on maximizing blog page views are pretty decent.
Most people would rather read something that they feel they can relate to and understand than something which is accurate.
That must be why PopSugar has traffic (and now, investment capital).
Hence, people's love of Wikipedia...:<(
Somebody's dog could pee on a keyboard and if you gave it a good title, people would Digg it.
In fact I bet something like this has already graced the front page of Digg.
This was on the front page a few days ago:
https://digg.com/hardware/Computers_and_Cat_Li...
It's not exactly a dog pee'ing on a keyboard, but it's close
Great find!
I will digg it for originality and quality of content!
I suppose that's the problem right there. What a "digg" means to you (originality or quality) isn't what a "digg" means to others. When I started using Digg (shortly before the launch), they were a "social bookmarking site". A "digg" didn't mean that you were implicitly voting for the link, but that you were saving it for later. However, promotion to the front page based on diggs made that take on a new context. Now it is understood that a digg is a "vote", but how many diggers like myself are clinging to the old ways?
The inclusion of categories makes it even worse. Does a vote mean you approve of the content completely, or that it just fits the category well? What if it doesn't fit the category at all, but is still good content? Although you can "bury" based on a variety of reasons, a digg is just a vote with no semantic quality attached.
I see what you're saying Rob and I agree to some extent. In similar terms, when I use StumbleUpon, and I give a website a thumbs down, that does not mean I hate the website or its creators, but that I don't want to see it again and am not interested in stumbling sites of that topic. However, my StumbleUpon homepage shows sites I gave a thumbs down as "Sites I don't like" which is inaccurate.
Anyway -- my point with the joke above was, either I have to get over it, and deal with the fact that Digg is a site where a lot of crap gets to the first page, or Digg has to improve their monitoring of posts and expand their sections to allow for a larger variety of content to potentially make the first page.
I sincerely hope my business competitors will keep reading more articles like "How to Promote your AdSense Niche Site".
Actually it must be true that a large % of digg users don't read the article that they are digging. I remember my first front page digg was just a test to see how easy it is to get dugg using a Top 10 list. I compiled a let's say questionable Top 10 list and next thing I know I am on the front page. (I still receive hate mails for that list however :p)
What was the list? :)
Nothing offensive or bad, it was just a "Random 10" list baptised "Top 10" but I guess some people take things a bit too personal.
Perhaps I'll get flamed, but sometimes I think Diggrz just don't really know SEO/SEM. I've commented on a few things that have been dugg that are just plain out "wrong". Regardless of how wrong they are the diggs still go up.
I guess that's just the by-product of how easy it is to "game" digg, especially with the sentiment "hey all my friends... digg my article ... please!!!" with no regard to whether or not the information in the article they dugg is factual or not. :(
I saw the article on Digg and thought it might be something relevant, instead it was completely inane, outdated and useless. I quickly hit the "bury" button. However I'm not sure how many Digg users use this tool.
Yeah I saw this on Digg and Del.icio.us too. My "WTF" flag went up. Simply couldn't believe there was geniune interest.
This article is so generic, it makes me think about writing an article titled "How to Start An Adsense Site" and the first item would be "1: Find Your Niche". I bet that would blow their socks off!
This is another great example of how we are now living in the age of BS content.
I'm glad to see people are finally starting to realize what many of us have seen all along: that the communities at Digg (and Slashdot) rarely actually read the articles that they are voting for (or in Slashdot's case, commenting on).
Articles at Digg get voted for almost exclusively on the strength of the headline and synopsis, and if people read the article, it's normally after casting their vote (and/or voicing their opinion on the thing they haven't read yet). This is not exclusive to these communities, however. It's pretty much the same thing with any Journalism ... writing a strong headline and first paragraph is where the bulk of the effort in writing a news story goes because they understand what it takes to pull people through an article.
It takes a bit of psychology to write a headline that will get attention, as is evidenced by the Week 1 winner of the SEM Scholarship contest that Andy Beal is running (ironically, against an article I wrote about using psychology in SEO). That article was titled something like "The SEO Article You Shouldn't Read." There could hardly be a better way to get people to click the link.
It's interesting to see how much outdated information about SEO is still proliferated.