Getting best out of Digg
For better PR or for better traffic or ranking in search engine results, social networking sites are fast gaining prominence. Digg, deli.cio.us or stumble upon have fast emerged as the leading social networking sites. Does linking to these sites help? Answer is, it used to be much more relevant earlier and is now losing prominence. Unfortunately, it is we, the programmers who are basically responsible for defeat of otherwise such a wonderful concept and principle or social networking site.
The basic theory about such site is that, it is the visitors that are supposed to approve or disapprove a site for benefit of other visitors so that it is easier for them to get the best content on the subject they are looking for. However the innovative webmasters were quick to exploit the loopholes of the system and instead started manipulating the system for self promotion means. Today there are dozens of site that encourage swap digging each other’s post. Few days ago I even came to know of a site that charges a certain sum to dig your article on your behalf through their account and also to pay half of that sum per dig to you if you dig some article of their choice on their behalf. No wonder many honest and good articles go undugg.
As the system stands to day, digging is resorted to generating back links so that the site gets better PR, ranking and traffic. However, digging, if intended to be done as a way to monetize the site and to get ad clicks, now a days is not as useful, because of various factors, as:
1. Digg users have poor ad- click rate. It is of not much use to exploit the system to get the traffic. This fact is further supported by a study done by Chitika, and they have published the results of the survey on their web site. You may get some traffic, but such traffic would be mostly of webmasters, that would be costing you a lot of bandwidth and no similar return on your investment. In fact, why digg alone, most the posts done by webmasters on any forum with their web site in their signatures only happens to get traffic and no or very low returns. Webmasters (pun intended) have a sort of ad-blindness and have low ad click rate. Most of their visit is out of curiosity to see what is the latest in the industry and what new things are being followed by other web masters.
2. Digg visitors would have tendency to comment on your site on Digg itself and not on your site. What it essentially means that as webmaster, you are not immediately aware of the visitor comments about your site content and unless you keep on following the digg, you may not be aware of the comments on your site. But this is not a major issue as the whole digg system is designed not to tell webmaster of what a user thinks of his site, but instead a fellow visitor of the opinion about the site.
3. Mostly tech geeks are known to visit digg and visitors for other commercial sites have low tendency to refer digg.
4. The digg link of the site normally appears before the actual link of the site, which the digg points.
I am not trying to discourage use of digg here, but this is a request to webmasters not to exploit the system by artificially creating fake “diggs”. A good content, a fresh news, or other tech savvy article does get good traffic. It may accompany a poor ad click rate, but nevertheless it increases the visibility rate of your site, if the content is good, it will add to returning visitors as well.
