How Digg fought spammers and increased page views in one fell swoop
Back on September 19, 2007 Digg launched a new profile system. The idea was to put a little more social into the Digg system. Some people liked the changes while others did not.
A common thought at the time was that Digg made the changes to increase its Page View metric. This thought is based on the fact that links inside a users profile page were changed in such a way as to no longer allow "blind digging" of a user's submissions.
Many people focused on the "extra" click now required to get to a story. With the "Digg this" button removed from the profile page (and the story synopsis) anyone who went to your user profile page to see what you were up to would have to click on each story (going to the digg story page) before they could digg it or even get the story synopsis. This "extra click" methodology was seen by many top diggers as a way for Digg to quickly increase its Page View metric.
If you look at the old Digg profile page you will see that you can quickly interact with a story without ever going to the story page on Digg. You need never go anywhere but a user's profile page to find content on Digg.
The old Digg profile page looks a lot like all of the category pages on Digg. If you go to any non-profile page on Digg you will see content presented in the same manner as was once done on the user profile pages. It is only the profile pages that have been redesigned in such a way as to increase Page Views.
This tells me that this was not done to increase Page Views even though it likely will. There is a bigger change at work here and something that many people did not catch on to.
As you can see with the new profile pages there is no ability to digg, bury, comment or even see the actual content until you click the link and go ot the story page on Digg.
By changing the user profile pages so that they link to the Digg story and not directly to the story content (off of Digg), Digg has removed one of the biggest reasons SEO types spam Digg: BACK LINKS.
In the past every person who dugg a story would generate a back link in their user profile page, sometimes several back links. Every digg and comment created a new link in the profile page. If a story received 1,051 diggs and 500 comments that story would receive in excess of 1,551 back links from Digg. I say excess because you still get multiple back links from Digg due to the various category, sub-category and other areas a story can appear on Digg.
By removing the back links in the user profile pages Digg has both increased potential Page Views (you need to click twice to get to content from a profile page) and decreased the amount of back links that Digg provides. There is now no reason for a spammer to submit crap to Digg in the hopes of getting some back links.
Why? Because when a story gets buried it provides no more links, anywhere on Digg!
Sploggers will still try to game Digg for traffic, they just can't game it for SEO anymore. I wonder if the change at Digg had something to do with Page Rank dropping on so many Tech and News sites?
It’s a good way to fight spammers, but I for one, stopped using digg because of it. I spent years vetting friends just so I have a close group of 900 friends whose submissions aren’t spam. Since I can’t afford to wait the minute it takes each of those pages to load, I stopped reading their submitted stories. As a result, I hardly go to digg anymore.
Charbarred: good for you, now you can Get A Life!
Rhokz.com did this too, for almost the same reason. Although there has always been less detail on rhokz.
“…I have a close group of 900 friends whose submissions aren’t spam”
I dunno how you found 900 non spammers on digg.
I also stopped using digg because of the change. The profile page takes over 14 seconds to load and the landing page takes around 4. 20+ seconds just to look at one link is beyond frustrating.
Digg is just for getting your pages indexed on google quickly. The traffic you get is just a bonus.
Ummm, charbarred…you did not have a “close” group of 900 friends. And what you describe is what made Digg suck before. Idiots like you who blindly dugg friends’ submissions without reaing htem to see if they were actually digg worthy. Sure, you CLAIM it is becuase you knew your “friends” so well that they always submitted good stories. But the mere fact that you think that you had 900 close friends proves that you were just another one of the circle jerkers who gamed digg. You blindly dugg every submission from them, and they blindly dugg every submission from you. You are not supposed to Digg a story unless you read it. So it does NOT take an extra click to do this. Because you SHOULD have been doing it all along.
How can you possibly have a “close” group of 900 friends?
I have to agree with Charbarred. I hardly digg stories anymore as a result.
Charbarred: “a close group of 900 friends”
LOL
boo charbarred.
all the new profiles need is a story descrip so i decide to click or not.
Charbarred, it sounds like you really needed to step away from the computer anyways.
thank goodness for tabbed browsing.
Sorry but I must say I disagree, I don’t think this is what they intended at all. You would have had an easier time suggesting that they did this to avoid mindless diggs from users who didn’t read the actual article or page. I too believe it was done to increase page views, and to a lesser extent to stop mindless digs on articles that were never read (although this of course still happens in large numbers – a crowd mentality type situation).
Nonetheless, spammers are are focusing more on gaming Digg through systems like Digg-Boss and Breakthevote which actually do work, and if you sign up for such a service you’ll notice that a lot of sites using those systems are making it to the frontpage on a daily basis.
The problem is, now there’s a whole new kind of spamming going on. The losers/spammers who add EVERYONE blindly to their friends list in hopes that they can spam your shoutbox have about driven me off digg as well. I tried fighting them, but it just got overwhelming with 20 @sshats (who seem to only barely speak English) adding me every day. I keep my shouts closed to all but people I’ve added, but it sucks having to go check out everyone who “friends” you to see if you want to reciprocate. I finally just quit looking, which sucks. For all I know, there are people I would want to add, but I’m not sifting through a hundred profiles to check and see if they’re shout-spammers.
I hate it. Hate. It.
And like Charbarred said, it’s a PITA if you have a lot of legit friends. There is a greasemonkey script to digg friends’ submissions (only submissions) from your profile, but that isn’t great either, since it only shows the title of the post. It’s better than nothing, I guess. Too bad there isn’t a greasemonkey script to make digg like it used to be, though!
Charbarred, I’m in the same boat, found tons of friends with good quality submissions, now that is down the tubes… and it seems like more spam gets to the front pages now with the annoying shout function.
900 friends on Digg…. woah!! thats a huge number…. well i like the new Digg interface. It is a great site so I tend to bear the loading time. Bust must add here…. some times it becomes quiet inconvenient.
So what’s the answer?
[...] Â TechVat, I hate to break it to you, but this didn’t slow down SEO one bit. In fact I argue it did the opposite. [...]
Nonsense. 1500+ links from a single domain won’t help you in SEO too much.
[...] read more | digg story [...]