I'm a fan of Digg and visit it every day to read various stories and check out what's new. Every so often I comment on stories and submit stuff. I get a "woo hoo!" feeling whenever one of my comments gets a bunch of diggs or when a submission hits the home page, which, combined with the site's content and news stories, are what keep me coming back for more. Sure, lots of people bash Digg for being juvenile and too much of a boys' club, but since I'm a tomboy and often have the sense of humor of a 19-year old dude (my coworkers note that I average at least one poo or butt joke a week), Digg's community is just fine by me.
Lately the site has been cracking down on a lot of things and has been banning users and domains for committing various offenses. The latest user bans have mostly consisted of people who have used scripts to auto-digg stories, but there's been another crackdown that, in my opinion, is illogical and a wee bit ridiculous. Digg has banned sites that are commercial or salesy. Case in point: A friend of mine recently tried to submit content from a client's website. It was an interesting blog post that wasn't inundated with commercial links or calls to action on the page. However, he found out that Digg had banned the domain because the URL was commercial in nature (e.g., "greatcomputerdeals.com"). He tried to appeal his case, to no avail (I've heard from other Digg users that getting a ban lifted from your site is extremely difficult). Digg has also warned users who have submitted commercial domains and have even banned a few (I know of at least one user who was banned for submitting content from a retail site).
I understand the intent: Digg wants to prevent spammers from submitting pages from cheap-viagra-123.net and downgrading the quality of content on the site. However, what's the problem with a site like smartautoloans.com submitting an article about "How Not to Get Screwed When Buying Your First Car," especially when the content stems from the site's blog and is truly informative and interesting? Why should the fact that the domain is commercial ruin the quality of the content?
An easy example to refer to is Matt Inman and his free dating sites (Mingle2, then JustSayHi, then back to Mingle2). He's created a bunch of successful quizzes and comics that were geared to promote his dating site and drive signups. A lot of them became popular on Digg, but because of the recent crackdown, he's wary about submitting anything from the Mingle2 domain, despite the fact that the Digg community as a whole enjoys the content (sure, there are some people who lament the Mingle2 "spam," but many users noted that they didn't mind that the content came from a dating site and applauded the clever promotional tactics). Is anyone really going "Hey, this '8 Phases of Dating' cartoon is really funny! Wait, it came from a free dating site? Oh, eff that, this content sucks!"?
Honestly, shouldn't the users be able to decide if content from a commercial website is valuable instead of Digg automatically implementing a ban on the site simply because its domain is commercial in nature and the site sells stuff? And what about sites that serve up ads? Technically those are commercial websites because they're making money from ads, right?
Let's take a look at the stories that are currently top in all topics:
- "I can't imagine a President being named Obama" -- a video on YouTube, which serves ads on its home page
- Republicans Voting for Obama: In Their Own Words -- an article from The Huffington Post, which serves ads all over the article page
- Think Firefox 3 is fast? Try Firefox Minefield -- an article from CNET, which serves ads and has affiliate partnerships with retailers selling the products that the site reviews
- Fake Cop Busted After Pulling Over Real Cop -- an article from the Chicago Tribune, which serves ads and has affiliate partnerships with sites like Cars.com, Gadzoo.com, Apartments.com, and CareerBuilder.com in their Classifieds section
- Obama Has Some Fantasy Football Skills -- an article from ESPN.com, which serves ads, has a subscription service for both their magazine and exclusive access to the site, sells books, and charges for some of their fantasy leagues
- Economy Crashes but War Profiteers Doing Fine -- an article from Reuters, which serves ads and sells "Reuters Professional Products" to professionals
- Why are Docs From the Bailout Being Redacted? -- an article from Propublica.org, an independent, non-profit site that produces "investigative journalism in the public interest." I couldn't find any ads or obvious commercial intent, which makes sense for a non-profit site.
- Rick Astley might be given up and let down by MTV? -- an article from BestActEver.com, a pro-Rick Astley website that was trying to get Rick Astley voted as "Best Act Ever" for the MTV Europe Awards. Aside from the website's explicit awesomeness, I couldn't find any obvious commercial intent.
- World's most ineffective theft deterrent -- an image from Flickr, which sells Pro accounts for upgraded uploads and account features
- Gmail's Canned Responses is E-mail for the Lazy! -- an article from Wired, which serves ads and sells subscription services to their magazine
Okay, so out of the top 10 stories on Digg, only 2 can technically be defined as non-commercial in nature. The other 8 make money somehow--and really, what's wrong with that? Ain't no shame in rakin' in some green. So why are these sites given a pass while other more obvious commercial sites are vilified? Sure, the above domains are more established and mainstream, so I can understand why their content is featured. But honestly, shouldn't great content from a mid-level commercial domain be able to speak for itself? Why does it have to come from Wired or ESPN in order to be acceptable?
You could argue that most of the "commercial" sites I mentioned make their money from ad revenue and that Diggers don't click on ads, so therefore it's not really commercial, after all. Well sure, but I'm willing to bet that most of them wouldn't buy office supplies from a site whose "5 Best Movie Office Drones" list made the home page, either. It's pretty widely established that Digg is pretty abysmal for driving conversions, whether that conversion is a sale, sign up, or ad click. The goal of social media marketing is largely traffic and links, which in turn can lead to better rankings and conversions. So if ad-driven sites like Cracked and Forbes.com (with their stupid, stupid slideshows that are designed to serve up a buttload of ads per page) are fine because "Diggers don't click on ads," why isn't a product site okay since Diggers likely won't buy, anyway? And even if they do buy, what's wrong with that? What's wrong with a user reading an article or post and then clicking on an ad that interests him or buying a product that he needs or wants? How is that providing a negative experience to the end user?
Angry gripes aside, it's likely Digg won't change their stance any time soon, so if you're a commercial website with a commercial-looking domain, your chances of Digg success are slim unless you're willing to try some clever workarounds. That's not to say that social media marketing won't work for you--there's still lots of stuff you can leverage (StumbleUpon, Delicious, industry-appropriate forums, etc). However, if you're looking for success on Digg, it won't come easy. I guess that's the price you pay for trying to earn a buck.
What I've been doing is hosting the linkbait on a separate domain, with no mention of mingle2 or dating, and then once it goes popular I add "created by Mingle2" and add some signup links to our site. I usually wait until a few hours after it's been promoted before I feel it's safe to make this change.
If I'm not worried about reddit or digg, I'll just host it directly on Mingle2. The StumbleUpon community, (which is totally awesome, in my opinion) wil pretty much accept anything provided the content is enjoyable.
Those potential workarounds you mention could prove far more damaging to Digg than allowing commercial domains and dealing with some spam. What's to stop a company employing a little army of microsites that they use for submission, every one of which redirects back to the commercial domain either immediately or after a couple of days? Digg will go around banning their sites, but a company with enough resources could continue a cat-and-mouse game like that for a while.
I bet the hunt for inventive workarounds will take more human resources and be more irritating for employees than just dealing with spam. Digg was well named: they like to get themselves into unnecessary holes.
True, the workarounds can cause some problems (which is why I didn't specifically outline them in my post--didn't want to necessarily "condone" a risky tactic). Some sites, however, are already doing redirects with Digg submissions a few days after the fact, but I think Digg's not quite as concerned because by then most of the massive traffic bump has died down and there's only a trickle of users going to the page. Nonetheless, it is a questionable tactic that can potentially get your domain and user account banned if you get caught with your hand in the cookie jar.
Third higest digger Zaibatsu, who was a member for almost four years and with almost 100k diggs got banned last month for this reason. Someone redirected a digg article from a picture to some questionable content. Digg argued he did similar "offense" before and was warned about it. No way to verify that.
Here is a list of top 100 diggers and the ones who got banned. https://socialblade.com/digg/topusers.html
Most of you guys probably know about this.
Ah, I'll agree with you that redirecting an article about the X best action movies to a Viagra landing page is bad news. I just personally don't take issue with redirecting an article to the same article in a blog section on a domain that otherwise would have gotten banned or flagged on Digg because of its perceived commercial nature.
Exactly. It's a pointless banning system. It's like DRM - it'll stop only the most Naïve, and the rest will figure all sorts of damaging work-arounds.
And it just ends up lowering the quality of articles on Digg, and on the Internet as a whole. There are many of us out there who create very high quality articles and put them on our commercial sites to gain links and traffic.
Links and traffic are our payment for putting the time, effort and money into creating that awesome content and it will go away if there isn't a pay-off.
The Digg community has been against commercial domains before any filters/blocks were put in place. I was even given the "honour" to have been called an "***hat" on Digg! :) Now the community will have to turn on themselves for such sport, since digging of "commercial sites" will no longer be allowed. How about the "Top Ten Commercial Sites You Can't Digg!".
Great. And we all here will Digg it to the main page.
You hit the nail in the head Rebecca. I hae how we can let sites like Forbes of all sites to be conisdered and not a smaller site that might have the same, or even better, content.
As far as i'm concerned, every site that gets submitted and voted on in Digg is done so for a commercial reason. It makes me sick that Digg thinks it's users are just submitting stuff that "magically" hits the homepage.
The truth is that, everyone who hits the home page was doing so for a commercial or political reason, and I say if the content is good, then let it slide.
Of course if it's really shady and the site is selling pr0n ir pills or some spammy products, then I can see the reason for it. And if that's the case, it shouldn't be getting any diggs in the first place.
I Digg stuff for my peeps all the time, but if it's something I don't agree with, I'll say no and won't contribute to it, simple as that.
Let the users decide what's good and what's not, that's what the site is all about. Otherwise, I'll just go back to watching CNN and picking up a Maxim magazine for my one-sided news and entertainment.
I agree with with "Indy Media Group" I can't stand Digg they have blocked my SEO blog becuase they thought it was just promoting services.. When if you read it there are tons of free tips for SEO... Same with Newsvine..
You are absolutely right, but it seems Digg only has those rules so they can ban whoever they want whenever they want. If you're lucky, you can submit thousands of pages from your affiliate-spam website and be ok, I've seen it.
Here's a case: A partner has a funny pictures / videos blog and after one picture went popular on Reddit, someone submitted it to Digg and it only got 2 votes. After that, the domain was banned for being reported by users as spamming Digg's submission process. Yeah, right !
Digg actually sucks from this point.
why not come with aarticle.10 things to do and 10 things not to do at digg. :)
I tried with other site but never worked
As digg's need to drive revenue increases it's become more and more important for them to exclude any and all content on commercial sites that compete with their customers (advertisers).
create a site to compete with Digg that allows submissions with commercial urls
So true! Moreover, if you happen to have an affiliate program, don't be surprised if your affiliates get you banned from Digg. Affiliates are notorious for spamming everything and anything in order to earn a commission. After these affiliates have relentlessly submitted your product pages, you'll find out Digg doesn't like you any more and you've been banned.
What is really sad about this is the fact that it is out of your control. You can't tell your affiliates what they can and cannot do.
In our case, we recently rolled out our blog, but cannot get anything submitted to Digg because they have already banned our URL. I've tried to contact them to see if the blog URL can be unlocked, but, no luck. Sigh...
You won't get any meaningful response from Digg. It's like they have their head buried up their ass when it comes to that type of thing.
In regards to Matt Inman's Free Dating Sites, you forgot "YouPlusOne" which was the website between transitioning back from JustSayHi to Mingle2.
Not that I ever joined or anything...... no... definitely not.... I just happened to know that off the top of my head....
As a self-proclaimed top digger; who almost always gets submissions to digg frontpage at will (or so it seems), I think digg's decision to ban certain types of commercial sites is very reasonable. I can tell you from experience that getting a "spammy" site to digg frontpage (depending on the level of spam) is more easy than one would like to believe.
It is fairly easy to co-ordinate with a group of users to get any submissions to the frotnpage. Would you like to see ten artcles on the digg frontpage giving you hints on buying a cheap car or how to make money online? (sure you will)
The difference between the commercial sites that are getting banned and the commercial sites that are NOT getting banned (ie cracked), is that cracked doesn't exist for digg, so doesn't gizmodo (which has twice the traffic than digg itself!) or engadget or huffingtonpost. On the other hand a car loan blog exist to make "digg-bait" articles so that they pull some traffic to their car-loan business, mingle2 got lucky and most likely they will get banned next time around if they try to pull the same stunt (though I thought it was very creative).
It's hard to explain, but digg is not the crowd for insurance and car loan "blogs", and considering that more than 90% of the digg users don't actually "digg" articles (home many articles gets past 5k diggs out of 5 millions members?), if spammy articles like this makes digg frontpage on a regular, digg will loose a lot of its core user. So for Digg it's a matter of self-preservation.
Same reason, you won't see such articles in reddit or yahoo buzz or any such social media site (stmble upon doesn't count because it is already turning out to be "spammy") .
Interesting perspective; however, I already see content designed for Digg make it onto the site pretty regularly. As an Internet marketer, it's easy to spot this sort of stuff. It doesn't necessarily bother me; what does irk me is that a site that sells chocolates with the URL of "richmondchocolatecompany.com" is way more likely to get banned than an identical chocolate retailer with the domain "chocofans.com" because the latter domain is less "spammy" or commercial sounding. That's pretty ridiculous, IMO.
Yes there will always be spammy sites that will make one (or at best twice) appearace on digg frontpage; Digg knows it can never totally eliminate such things, but they try to minimize it as much as possible.
Also my understanding is that most of the sites that gets banned, is the result of a user "reporting" it, no one can monitor literally tens of thousands of submissions a day! If there is enough report, digg manually checks it and decides whether to ban it or not.
The idea is to "earn trust" from digg users and it has very little to do with domain name. When the first blog post submission to digg (or repeated submissions) from a company that sells chocolate, is all about the how good the company is at selling chocolate and everywhere within the blog post, there are links to it's own product or to it's home page; they will have no luck and will definately get reported by digg users.
But if the very first post, you can remove the blog from it's business (not necessarily a seperate domain) and actually present a content of interest and which doesn't look like someone slapped it together in ten minutes and not promote itself; you are more likely to be accepted by the digg users.
Later you can gradually, incremently promote your chocolate business within your blog in future posts. The way I see it is that it's all about gaining trust, like any business model.
There are two kinds of digger (actually three, but I won't get into it), the first kind are the one who regularly visits the "upcoming stories" and decides which sites to digg and which site to bury/report/ignore. They are the "gate keepers", you will need to convince them that you are trustworthy. The other kind are the digg user who doesn't go past the digg frontpage, and only visits sites that are onthe digg frontpage, that's your "traffic".
I think its easier to get a "chocolate blog" to get on the digg frontpage than getting an "insurance blog" to get on the digg frontpage (suicidal to the domain and the digg user account).
There are so many factory that goes into consideration for any article to make to the frotnpage, like what time of the day it is submitted, how many friends the submitter has (more friends are not necessarily better/ neither are quality friends), what category the submission was on, how busy is that category, does it make it to the TOP upcoming list in that category, how "diverse" are the group of users who dugg it (are they linked by friend's friend? did you shout to friends?), did that domain previously made the digg frontpage? Site design, writing quality (digg users are grammer nazis), pictures with contents.... and so on and so forth.
No wonder some "top diggers" actually take money to do submission. I do it for fun and to promote my own blog, and I am happy with the result so far (40+ digg frontpage this year from my blog) . :)
Actually I know the site that Rebecca is talking about in her article. The site and article were not spammy in any way. It was just a regular company site with a very well written article that appealed to a general audience. It was not talking about the company or promoting the services.
The really unfair part of this is that Digg has no appeal process. Writing to them only solicits a canned response about their TOS. It weighs down the site as a whole. Frankly, it's very easy to put up pages with no site markings or do the 301s. It's a shame that Digg doesn't have enough faith in their users to let them bury content that is not useful instead of banning a regular company domain with no advertising or marketing on the article page.
So while I'm glad to see you got 40+ articles on digg with a blog, there is no reason why a simple company URL should get banned. It's really absurd and making us play these games of bait and switching content is a little sad. It won't keep marketers off of digg, it just makes them more dishonest than they otherwise would be.
"I can tell you from experience that getting a "spammy" site to digg frontpage (depending on the level of spam) is more easy than one would like to believe.It is fairly easy to co-ordinate with a group of users to get any submissions to the frotnpage."
So shouldn't Digg be solving this core problem that the power users collaborate with each other and get any content to the front page they like.
And there can't be any justifiable metric to claim that site X was made for Digg and site Y wasn't. You yourself say that Mingle got lucky and may get banned next time. Do you think Mingle was made just for Digg.
Also, I am not sure if Stumble Upon is really spammy. I've been using it and find it really delivering good content. Also, from a marketer's point of view, Digg is like Front Page or nothing. I have seen articles get 100 Diggs but giving less than 20 visitors from Digg. And get your article 100 StumbleUpon Thumbs Up and you will know the difference. This is one major reason for SU's success and popularity. That unlike Digg, it delivers traffic even for newbies and non-power users.
SU is spammy because they take money from companies to promote their sites, I think they charge you by traffic.
My reference to "spammy" sites here was in reply rebecca referring to any site with ads as "spammy" sites. Sorry for my poor choice of words, English is only my third language. :)
The paid content in SU is usually categorized, and delivered only to people interested in that content. So it's not too different than Google Ads.
And, you can pay SU ~$20 if you don't wan't to see ads.
BTW, I think Rebecca meant that if you classify sites as spammy because they are commercial and sell something, then you should also classify sites with advertisements as spammy. But I don't think she really meant they are spammy.
Outside the subject of spam (unsolicited commercial) emails, spamming is a very subjective term and is used loosely by some big players to enforce their interests.
While marking something as spam, the Digg staff needs to see if the content itself is of good quality or not. If the same content had been on Ars Technica and could hit Front Page, then they should let it hit the Front Page while hosted on buycheapcameras.com (just used as example).
I think here the quality of content is not important. Many many occasions quality contents does not make it to the digg frontpage (remember 10s of thousands of submissions a day. 24 hours window for frontpage).
The thing is arstechnica (or gizmodo, endgadget, xkcd, cracked, huffington post, Ny times and almost all popular sites among diggers), does not actually sell any products; atleast not directly. They make money almost purely on advertisement revenue.
On the other hand sites thats rebecca and you are referring to, is a business model (selling viagre - chocolate - car loans - insurance), that happens to have a blog purely for the purpose of driving traffic to their business. They don't necessarily do it for the ad-revenues.
Which is a violation of the digg TOS.
While I am not saying digg is always right, and they have been wrong quite often in the past, but in this case digg is right to not allow sites like this to have access.
As previously mentioned, sites like insurance sales and chocolate business or viagra is not for social media. There is a place for everything and as much as some of us in the SEO would love to have the oppurtunity to take advantage of social media, the best way is the way mingle2 has handled the situation. And I think they have done a fantastic job. There has been viagra ads on the digg frontpage, because it was funny, it was a conversation starter, it was very creative. That's the best way for SEO marketeers to take advantage of digg or social media sites in general.
Maybe digg are simply trying to help the system by making their submissions a more 'level' playing field. But then their homepage covered in cnet, wired etc, doesn't substantiate that claim.
I am trying really hard to play devils advocate but simply can't see any reason why a move like this would be beneficial to anybody.
Lastly, when a site leaves its moderation up to their discretion, it makes a lot of people nervous about doing anything because there are no black and white rules. And, as you said Rebecca, if a site runs ad's it should be classed as commercial too. My site runs ad's. I probably shouldnt submit content to digg now. :(
Actually from Rebecca's example above, they don't really seem to have a problem with ads from what I've been told. They did however have a problem with a plain company site. And the URL wasn't even as bad as Rebecca makes it out to be. The URL was more like companyacronym.com. It wasn't referencing deals or any form of marketing. The article had the site menu and logo as would any other site. But it got banned from Digg and there was no explanation given.
Actually there was an explanation that made no sense. I've pasted their email below:
Please see our Terms of Use (digg.com/tos), which state, in part, that users cannot use the site to "advertise to, or solicit, any user to buy or sell any products or services. It is also a violation of these rules to use any information obtained from the Services in order to contact, advertise to, solicit, or sell to any user without their prior explicit consent;"
Thanks for your understanding,
- Digg Support Team
I have a commercial site - in that it is basically a brochure/advertisement for my data processing business in hopes that possible customers might search for the service I offer. I see that Digg is not well suited to my type of a site. I also have a blog about working from home (I started my data processing/data entry company working at home and use home workers) so I see that it might benefit.
Thanks.
Did someone notice any similarity of keywords pattern in the users lastest post that got them banned : "best", "deals", "company", "vigra", "cheap" etc.
Rebecca,
By the end of the first paragraph, you have no idea how much I'm looking forward to meeting you & Team-Moz in London very soon.
As for the rest of the post: I'm not a big diggger, so I didn't know about the 'comercial crackdown' - but that really is crazy.
Jane's going to London next week, but I'm staying behind. Would love to meet you soon though!
Lets say you have an e-commerce site (which I do) with a blog in a subfolder (which I will do) completely away from your main site, where you don't attempt to sell to your readers (except maybe a deep link back into the store on a product review, perhaps) - are the implications still the same, or are you likely to get away with that?
I havent digged a lot of stuff but every time I look at the digg's homepage homepage I think for myself 'am i different to everyone else in this large community or are they simply digging stuff that looks uninteresting to me?' Still i cant criticise them for banning some commercial websites... i guess it's the price to pay to be in a 'make money' industry where spammers proliferate...
As a website owner and only occassional user of social media sites, I'll weigh in and say that I think Digg is utterly and completely useless. I haven't submitted anything to digg in at least a year, and haven't visited the site since then either. It's primarily controlled by a small set of users who dedicate an inordinate amount of time and energy to becoming the "top diggers", and the majority of the time the crap (there's no other way to put it) that ends up on the front page is not worth my time to peruse.
I have found StumbleUpon to be a much friendlier and even playing field to use, both as a webmaster and a regular user, and once I "stumbled upon" StumbleUpon I never gave digg a second thought.
Useless? I got on digg the day before yesterday with some beardbait: www.biggerbetterbeards.org
The end result was 600,000 page views and 300,000 unique visitors (in 48 hours). Love it or hate it, digg is certainly not useless.
For me, yes - utterly and completely useless. For someone such as yourself who obviously has built up a reputation within the digg community, I can see how it would be worthwhile.
But I don't have the time or the inclination to do the work needed to get to the point where you are. Perhaps if I was working at promoting websites full-time, and using digg as a means of promoting my websites, then I would find digg useful. But I really don't have the time or the interest to wade through all of that crap. ;)
I have no reputation within the digg community. In fact, if they catch wind that they're about to be subject to a round of mingle2 or matt inman linkbait, they bury me. I go out of my way to make my content look benign, and I certainly don't spend all day building up my digg account.
I think if you got on digg and saw the benefits of having your site in front of that many people, you'd think a little differently.
You don't have friends / acquaintances who help push your submission up by digging it as soon as you've submitted it? From what I remember, if you didn't get a handful of diggs immediately upon submission it got lost in the sea of other submissions quite quickly.
Either way, it's clear that you're a better man than me at this! I gave up on digg a while back, but obviously don't have the promotional talent that you do. That seems like the main difference.
How much of that traffic converted Matt? Either into links or by signups to Mingle2?
I'm actually interested, not knocking you.
useless??
People put alot of effort to get their site on digg, you will know when you see the traffic. I have got way more than 100,000 views in a single day in many ocassions, and let me tell you it's NOT useless.
Congrats to you. I am sure the 100,000 page views has benefitted you greatly and is worth the time and effort that you've spent to achieve it.
For me, it's useless.