How to be a Dirty Digger
Posted on December 20th, 2006by Michael Gray in Grayhat SEO, Social Networks
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Ok I’ve been carrying this post around in my head for a while and am I’m finally going to spill it, here are my tips on how to completely screw your competition in a web 2.0 social media world.
- Everyone who’s ever submitted a story to digg knows a snappy title can mean the difference between making the homepage and getting half a dozen votes and fading into oblivion. So when your competition publishes a new blog post, do them a favor and submit it on their behalf. Something with click poison all over it like ‘cool new idea’ or ‘Good post on www.example.com’ should do the trick
- Instead of taking a passive role you could always go with Captain Obvious. Get a disposable email, preferably something like competitiorname@hotmail.com, nothing says I’m a complete spammer like a hotmail address. A hyphen in there will never hurt. Then every time they submit a blog post make sure you submit it to digg or netscape. Make your title’s drip with web 1.0 usability like ‘click here for great travel deals’ or ‘I made 1.21 Million Last year on EBay with these tips’. Keep it up until you get your account banned and the URL banned as well
- Still not satisfied, go to your local library or internet cafe set up 15 or so accounts on the same IP and ’self vote’ for stories from your competiton’s url
- Still haven’t them gotten banned yet, then make sure you email all of the top 100 digg users or get them in IM chats. Some of them will post the chat logs if you say the right things.
- Is there site still getting through then make sure you bury a story as soon as possible. Want to make sure you don’t miss one, link to an RSS feed for their URL so you know when something gets submitted. Send out a quick email or IM to 15 or so of your friends asking them to bury the story, that’s usually all it takes to make sure something never sees the light of day
- Are their stories still making it in set up another sock puppet account and narc on yourself. Tell them how the “person” owning your other account was supposed to pay you for digging their stories but you haven’t gotten the money yet and they won’t return your email. Ask tech support if they wouldn’t mind dropping them an email reminding them that they forgot to pay you.
The reason all of this works is that despite being a web 2.0 company Digg and Netscape are still in Spam 1.0 mentality. The biggest problem is Google has grown up the black operations spammers so much that they are sophisticated enough to make a web assassination look like spamming self suicide. Thats what happens when you act and react in planned and predictable ways. At this stage of the game Google is “smart enough” that they usually ignore or discount that type of thing realizing interpreting someone’s motives is a slippery slope. So how about it Digg, Netscape and all of you other social media sites, let’s lose this queen of hearts off with their head mentality, and realize the person you thought was guilty may have just been set up to take the fall.
PS: I’m sure someone is going to submit this story and as sure as the sun rises in the east it will get buried. Why … plain and simple it doesn’t agree with the “typical” digg users world view. Despite the fact that it’s true and making adjustments based on the information would be a wise choice, sadly it will go largely unnoticed.
Update:
Dugg and buried, not at all shocking, it’s a shame this information won’t get in front of people who could use it to fix digg and netscape.
Update II
Check out Lee’s post for this scenario put into action The hypocrisy of digg and spam
December 20th, 2006 at 7:20 am
I was going to write the same post. Only I was going to call it “how to succeed in a web 2.0 social media world without really trying” (without points 3 and 6)
“nothing says I’m a complete spammer like a hotmail address”
That brought me a few chuckles
Actually that a pretty god ides for a post.
“Nothing says I’m a complete spammer like…”
December 20th, 2006 at 8:55 am
I’m not going to be the one to digg this but someone is bound to, and I can’t wait to see the reaction it gets from the ‘digg is my life’ hardcore over there!
So, these techniques work do they
December 20th, 2006 at 10:16 am
I spit coffee all over my keyboard! Now that you’ve given away all the secrets, web promotion will never be the same again.
December 20th, 2006 at 10:51 am
Oh yeah, real good idea. Some rat bastard (and I’m being nice) did this to me recently. Stuff like this in practice just validates why paranoid diggers and mainstream media have the perception that SEOs are scumbags.
December 20th, 2006 at 11:38 am
Pure evil.
December 20th, 2006 at 12:20 pm
MG you dog. Looking to make friends with this one, huh?
December 20th, 2006 at 12:36 pm
Digg ban for wolf-howl.com in 3…2..1.
It’s getting enough votes to make it to front page but I seriously can’t see the editors letting this one pop up there.
Great post.
December 20th, 2006 at 2:01 pm
And yet another reason why this blog got my vote for SEO Blog of The Year recently.
December 20th, 2006 at 2:34 pm
Did it get buried? It made popular but i can’t see it anywhere
December 20th, 2006 at 2:41 pm
Excellent analysis. Thanks.
December 20th, 2006 at 3:29 pm
Brian Clark took the words (and the smiley) right out of my mouth…..
Seriously, this kind of thing is why I’m not drinking the Digg kool-aid.
December 20th, 2006 at 4:56 pm
Great post, Michael. Made me think about how easy it is to get someone’s URL banned from Digg.
December 21st, 2006 at 9:23 pm
This is the kind of post that deserves an Oscar, Emmy, Tony, Webby, Bloggy, Diggy, and a position in the web marketing truth Hall of Fame. Simply fantastic. Reminds me of the early days when we exposed sock puppet Q&A tag-team posts in USNET newsgroups. Kudos to you Michael. I try like hell to explain the gaping trust holes in the SM world. I’m sure people have tired of hearing me preach at the conferences that services like Digg and others are all mildly amusing, socially fascinating but of little or no long term strategic value to the majority of web sites.
Digg reminds me of a really big high school where the jock clique and the math team clique and the band clique each weild power within their sphere of influence, while the rest of school and town in general could give a sh*t.
I do have some clients for whom I’ve been able to digg-nudge their sites up to the front page, but truth is, Digg’s front page is of high value to only a certain type of site, and of marginal to zero value for most sites.
Eric
December 22nd, 2006 at 12:12 pm
This is kind of obvious don’t you think? People have done this kind of thing online and offline for a while.
The fact is (at least on Netscape) that at the end of the day the quality of the site is what is going to be looked at. So, if you did this with the NYT or Boingboing the Anchors and Navigators at Netscape would simply look at the site and say “this is a quality site, someone is playing with us.”
So, yes you could screw with a smaller site, but at least at Netscape you can email (sitemail) every member of the staff and they will get back to you. We banned a ton of domains and we turned many back on when I was there.
I think your concept works best on machine run systems–but on one with a human it would only work for a) small domains, b) bad content, and c) the very short term.
best jason
December 22nd, 2006 at 6:43 pm
I had the same idea, I picked a random website and basically tested Graywolf’s theory on “How to be a Dirty Digger” here’s what happened:
(The Mark) I found a link to a website that someone posted on a popular gaming forum. I had never herd of this website before, the Alexa ranking was not great but is was in the top 100k.
For the record the website link I submitted to digg was interesting and would have probably made it to the front page if I worded it right instead of sabotaging it.
(The Setup) It was real easy all I did was put the domain name “myebid.com” in the title. I think that did the trick, instead of diggers just burying it I saw it getting marked as spam instantly via digg spy.
(The Ban) To make sure the story didn’t just get buried and to make sure the site got banned I singed up with Ten different hotmail accounts and then dugg the story. In an hour my accounts were closed and the website was successfully banned.
(The Conclusion) While I’m not exactly sure if it was digging my own story or making it look like spam, I do know it was real easy to get the site banned. It’s funny too because diggers always submit links to BS stuff from sites like ebay and others but because the sites are so well known diggers just mark the stories as lame and not spam. I know a few people that have tried to get ebay auctions to the front page of digg just to get the counter up, if that’s not spam what is.
While it’s pretty clear you can’t “game” digg in some ways, you sure can game it in others. I did get my story to the front page although it did get dugg down immediately. It topped out at about 35 diggs then made it to the front page and got spammed to death, some diggers even started to undigg it and my fake diggs got removed.
Digg has a real problem on its hands, it seems only 1% or so “the top diggers” have power over 95% of what happens on the site. It will only get worse as time goes on.
I think I will try and do it again but with another slightly more popular website, I have my eye on “woot.com”
Wish me luck and feel free to help!
P.S.
Sorry to http://www.myebid.com it wasn’t personal but someone had to go down.
December 30th, 2006 at 7:06 pm
Nice counter to the prevalent cool-aid. Important to be reminded, frequently, that there’s as much energy out there doing bad stuff as there is good — and that any system can be gamed.
Supposedly, many PR firms now make sure that articles they place are emailed a lot, so they show up as “most emailed”, which drives lots of viewership.
What’s that adage: “first time you’re scammed, you’re a victim; second time you’re a co-conspirator”.
Also, you should implement Snap Preview Anywhere on your site (www.snap.com); would make it better (disclosure: I’m in investor in Snap).
March 20th, 2007 at 9:35 pm
Did somebody say “banned from Digg”? Get extra exposure by being listed on bannedfromdigg.com
March 28th, 2007 at 5:41 pm
Digg.com is getting cocky and banning small web sites just because digg’s users submit them to digg and digg’s moderators don’t like it. Scifidigg.com is the latest victim of Digg’s “We are big, you are small and we can do whatever we want†attitude.
First some background.
After running the website Scifi2u.com for the last year we realised there was a demand for a scifi digg type website – 6 Days ago ScifiDigg.com was born and is powered by open source Pligg and the YouTube API.
So what went wrong?
The site went live on the 22 March 2007. People submitted stories and video links to digg and other sites del.icio.us, Yahoo, Simply and Reddit. Having a submit button makes submitting very easy and fast but that could be a problem.
Let’s get to the point
WITHIN 6 DAYS THE SITE HAS BEEN BANNED FROM DIGG
Digg’s moderators decided that since the link pointed to my site and the posts are mainly videos from YouTube ScifiDigg should be banned from digg and no other links from scifidigg.com can be posted to digg.
Digg’s response
I contacted digg to find out what happened and why they blocked my site. The response I got from them was that my site violated their terms of use, by copying another site. I explained to them that although the video is streamed by YouTube we give the facility for original coments to be added.
The response I got was that they do not allow sites that copy other sites to be submitted to digg. I told them that according to their rules they should also ban Yahoo news, since it does not have an original content but republish articles from PCWorld, Reuters, MACWorld and others. Also falls under this category other major sites like neowin.net, blink.nu and many more that are doing exactly the same infact they should ban YouTube because the video content is often copied from other video websites. But hey, they are big sites and digg can’t pick on them without repercussion, like they can pick on small blogs that try to establish themselves.
So what have we learned?
· Digg’s users don’t really determine what gets promoted, but digg’s moderators do.
· Digg have a different set of rules for small site and different rules for big sites, even though both are doing the same.
· Digg will ban a small site just because one of its user’s submitted an article that other digg members liked and promoted, but moderator didn’t like the link.
· Digg will not listen to reason when told that the site did not violate its TOS.
April 18th, 2007 at 4:09 pm
Hahahahahaha
Its f***** Evil post
September 11th, 2007 at 7:01 am
the only way to fuck digg, is to make more digg like sites with better ways to vote and improve the news, when you have 100 diggs like sites, they will have to be humble or die
July 23rd, 2008 at 8:14 am
[...] you’re doing things that pisses off diggers, a little shady and dirty, you can become one of the better diggers and put a helping hand for the community to grow. [...]