How to Get Any Story Buried on Digg
Do you believe in magic? I do. Especially if it can be done by anyone.
Digg is a place where any Apple or game console marketer can succeed quickly in getting thousands of visitors. He just has to mention the magic words Apple, iPod or iPhone and add something totally ridiculous to the headline. Something like "I ate my iPhone" or "How my iPod saved my life" or "Apple created an iPhone out of bacteria". That's not magic, that's business as usual on Digg.
So while it's that easy to get on the Digg front page and most people who try to game Digg know it, it's not as easy to get your competitors buried on Digg it seems. Of course you can submit any story written by your rival from a made up Digg account with no friends and then use a boring as hell headline and a description full of mipsplelings but I discovered a surefire way to get any story buried in Digg despite of its source, topic, quality and popularity.
How do I know?
I wrote a guest post for a popular blog that was on Digg prior to this but my story was buried while being wildly popular at the same time. It received 50 diggs in 4 hours, even having some Digg power users who I truly respect among those voting. At first I assumed it was an administrative step to bury it because usually you get plenty of hate comments on Digg and this one got none. The contrary was the case, only three friendly comments appeared altogether.
I wouldn't have submitted the story myself as I think Digg is worth a pile of shit, it's anti-social censorship not social news, it's an apolitical Apple public relations playground full of hatred against anyone who is not 200% US American mainstream. Somebody else did anyways. So I watched it closely in disbelief.
Now I rechecked the history of similar stories again, I knew it before, but I checked it once again to prove the point that any story containing the three magical letters S, E, O in it's title will get buried unless the story stems from or is about Google or covers why SEO is abominable.
So if you hurry up and use the magic acronym "SEO" on an article by the A-list blogger you hate before he can submit it you can get the story buried. Why? Diggers who bury SEO stories do not read them as the number of referers from Digg was in my case below the number of diggs. I assume that some readers voted after reading the story on the blog. They clicked the Digg voting button. Nonetheless if you get 60 diggs and just 50 visitors from Digg it seems to me that those who buried the story did not visit in the first place.
Moreover the statistical data is overwhelming, while many of the most popular stories in many cases contain terms like "Apple, iPod, iPhone" in their titles, only 8 stories with "SEO" in the title made the front page this year, but the last one
So basically it comes down to ignorance:
Add "SEO" to any story and test it. It's fun, it's amusing, it's exposing Digg.
If the title does not make sense with "SEO" in it, just add it in front: "SEO: Apple sold to Microsoft".
Btw. do not digg this story! It's not a Digg bait, I not only do not care for Digg, I also treat it like a potential DDoS attacker. I want decent people to laugh about Digg and turn their backs on it. I welcome them at StumbleUpon and other really social media.
[...] Digg gets worse each day and looses traffic (it’s at an all time low by now according to Alexa) specialized social [...]
Man, that is so true. In a similar vein, the same applies for Reddit, except there it has to be Linux, Ron Paul, police brutality (esp. tasering), or atheism.
I think I dugg that article when it was at about 50 diggs and it looked like it would take off. Write about SEO and get buried. Write about how to make t-shirts with a Digg logo (and submit this to the technology category) and get thousands of diggs. Kind of messed up.
I used to surf to digg every day for more than 2 years.
It’s been 6 months since my last visit.
Ive submitted some great stories – non of them made it to be popular. I’ve never buried a story.
I sugsgest you all to ignore Digg. The traffic is shitty.
Digg wil stay with us for a while like Slashdot, but the early adopters, the good people will move on.
I don’t hate Digg but I do get frustrated a lot of the time. When good stories and articles with real content and information that people need to be aware of get buried when all the top people on Digg are voting for the story it just baffles me. Sometimes when it comes to government type stories I feel there is a professional PR team burying stories.
Man this is some insight! I have never thought about submitting seo articles on digg, and have only submitted like one which is to notify people of my site.
Basically, it’s not just about SEO stories. The Digg system is flawed. Really great stories stay unnoticed most of the time.
I always knew diggers were a bunch of shit-wads. Good article.
reddit is also quite frustrating; search is always down. With digg, onreact is correct – a lot of good stories stay unnoticed and even worse, they get buried by people who don’t even read the stories!
Right, Reddit is also anti-SEO to the point of censorship.
Someone submitted an article of mine there and it was buried instantly. It was just ridiculous. Those news sites have been overtaken by paranoid male teens interested in Linux, their Ipods and tits.
I don’t care for Reddit though. It’s so unimportant that I do not even waste my time on it. Digg is still to big too be ignored. It’s just sad for the users who spent so much time building the community, now the hooligans come and destroy their work but Mr. Rose lets them, he hates SEO too not noticing that he bites the hand that feeds him.
“I not only do not care for Digg, I also treat it like a potential DDoS attacker.”
That made me smile…
Basically I thought about using .htaccess to block users coming from Digg, but it’s not necessary as I use the magic words…
I found this on Google, so at least your page about SEO is well-SEO’ed.
You guys completely miss the point. Stories about SEO get buried because 99% of Digg users seem to not be real web devs in any capacity. They associate SEO with spam and spammers. They assume SEO is the reason that their Google results for popular searches are littered with advertisements for the first 5 pages of results – which, it largely is.
SEO is no longer something that anyone on digg is knowedgable about, or even interested in. To them, you guys are scum, “ruining the web”.
Exactly Jeff: Most people on Digg are ignorant, frustrated Internet newbies who can’t even distinguish between Spam and SEO. Nothing new in your comment.
Tad,
So I haz an ideaz. Kinda like Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon. How about the art of fighting without fighting? If you leave any referencing or key words such as SEO out of your blog or even article, yet teach people how to optimize, that will lure Diggers into the site. So what I am saying is do SEO and teach SEO without ever saying SEO. THAT would be a slick Jedi move. People would good educated and never knew they were learning SEO. No I am going to be honest, I know nothing about SEO, I will leave to experts like you. But, if you could find a way to do that, it would be smooth. Good article BTW.
SilentJay74: What’s SEO? Are you talking about findability?
http://seo2.0.onreact.com/findability-new-and-better-seo-experts-disagree-12-findability-resources
;-)
So you are going to tell me that mixx isn’t where I can find my latest dose of anti-digg propoganda? Look at these comments, keep it up guys I can’t wait for the hate to consume mixx too.
“I think Digg is worth a pile of shit…”
This is offensive, and an insult to all the hard-working cattle farmers who supply the world with the rich, organic compost needed to fertilize the soil we grow out fuel… er, food in.
On a more serious note, I wonder what would happen if you were to submit a story to Digg with the following title: “Ron Paul uses iPod to listen to podcasts about SEO techniques”.
This would actually make for a very interesting experiment.
Anyway, I enjoyed the article, and I share many of the same sentiments about Digg as you have expressed.
@Tad Good point my man! I see what you mean.
Spot on ^^
I’ve written two posts about GIMP and one about Apple, and both got dugg well.
Then I wrote a useful (and not necessarily Digg-bait) post about useful free substitutes to paid software, it got 61 diggs, was in Hot in software sidebar section and then just BAM! it disappears.
Digg is for Apple/Linux/gadgets/weird stuff, and anything else will be buried or removed by Digg moderators.
I am really sick of their hypocrisy too – they do not acknowledge presence of moderators or auto-bury list, yet there’s enough proof for both.
I’ll be baiting Digg again – but unlike others, my hope is that I’ll get new readers so that I can get down to writing proper content again (many of my friends have grown readership with Digg software section), but I think SU, Delicious and Mixx are much better sources of quality traffic.
Looking forward to the day Digg falls under its own weight.
I’ve noticed this too. It doesn’t matter if the story is interesting or not, if it doesn’t fall into an officially sanctioned Digg niche, it won’t fly. That’s why I’ve started using sites like Mixx. Most of my blog stuff is about beer and homebrewing, so luckily someone created a Digg-like site for beer (BrewPoll). Is that what needs to happen for other niches? Create your own Digg or perish?
[...] developers. Now the submission to Digg included the word “SEO” instead which equals to self-annihilation on Digg. No story that contains “SEO” in its title makes the Digg front page. So study your [...]
[...] we all know all SEO is bullshit, evil and spam. So as a SEO 2.0 evangelist I recently thought about some black hat SEO 2.0 methods for an [...]
i think you all are crazy and should just eat the apple -lol-
What if you advertise the SEO in a different way?
Most polular Digg articles are following the same formula:
Top ten things that will get you something!
Six new ways to get exactly what you want!
Maybe something along the line of ‘Top ten reasons how SEO can help your website’ will be more effective? Or are they really that much against SEO?
Vertaling: Yes, there are. No way of going frontpage with writing about “SEO”. Unless you call Apple iPod instead.
[...] period were about SEO, and Digg is somewhet picky about articles that cover SEO (as mentioned here: http://seo2.0.onreact.com/how-to-get-any-story-buried-on-digg). Therefore I don’t think that we can automatically discount Digg. It has a huge user [...]
SEO has a smaller audience than many of of the things mentioned on digg. Its not a venue for something like that, but with something apple, linux, list related you have a general subject matter that can find a broad audience. Congrats on your good SEO for this post, its a bit ironic that my search for “get a story on digg”, brought up your article.