Tracking the number of times a particular blog hits the Digg homepage isn’t really a great indicator of popularity. Some Digg stories get a couple of hundred Diggs while others are far more popular and attract several thousand.
Luckily Google offers a simple way to measure the overall popularity of a site with the Digg audience by making use of its site: command. This tracks all mentions of a site including when people link to you in the comments section.
Looking at the results for BlogStorm we can see that my site has a Digg saturation of just under 3,000 meaning that the phrase blogstorm.co.uk is mentioned 3000 times on the Digg website.
“Why does this matter?” I hear you ask. Well, looking at the number of links to a site from Digg is an easy way for Google to see what sites should be ranking and which are spam. Its easy to get one low quality story to the Digg front page but to fake a Digg saturation figure of well into the thousands is totally impossible.
The Top sites by Digg Saturation
- 1. YouTube – 551,000
- 2. yahoo.com – 191,000
- 3. Google – 188,000
- 4. Ars Technica – 135,000
- 5. Engadget – 121,000
- 6. BBC – 106,000
- 7. Gizmodo – 104,000
- 8. Wikipedia – 93,100
- 9. wired.com – 89,700
- 10. CNN – 64,900
- 11. Apple – 55,000
- 12. crooksandliars.com – 54,200
- 13. Consumerist – 49,300
- 14. thinkprogress.org – 41,800
- 15. dailymail.co.uk – 38,900
- 16. break.com – 38,600
- 17. msn.com – 36,400
- 18. treehugger.com – 34,600
- 19. Kotaku.com – 33,500
- 20. macrumors.com – 30,900
- 21. Destructoid.com – 28,500
- 22. timesonline.co.uk – 26,700
- 23. Boing Boing – 24,100
- 24. microsoft.com – 21,300
- 25. downloadsquad.com – 21,200
- 26. cracked.com – 20,200
- 27. jalopnik.com – 18,100
- 28. Read Write Web – 17,300
- 29. Huffington Post – 17,100
- 30. littlegreenfootballs.com – 16,900
- 31. lifehack.org – 16,700
- 32. Tuaw.com – 15,500
- 33. myspace.com – 15,500
- 34. Smashing Magazine – 14,800
- 35. dailykos.com – 13,800
- 36. valleywag.com – 13,200
- 37. neatorama.com – 12,600
- 38. zenhabits.net – 11,400
- 39. Giga Om – 10,700
- 40. tmz.com – 10,600
- 41. TechCrunch – 9,760
- 42. FileFront.com – 9,680
- 43. techdirt.com – 8,910
- 44. wikihow.com – 8,760
- 45. CrunchGear – 8,220
- 46. XKCD.com – 7,990
- 47. menshealth.com – 7,890
- 48. facebook.com – 7,830
- 49. Life Hacker – 7,580
- 50. GamerNode.com – 7,330
- 51. michellemalkin.com – 6,440
- 52. WSJ.com – 5,970
- 53. inhabitat.com – 5,460
- 54. ohgizmo.com – 5,380
- 55. Search Engine Land – 4,760
- 56. tumbl.us – 4,560
- 57. Pronet Advertising – 4,500
- 58. Search Engine Journal – 3,560
- 59. Mashable – 3,360
- 60. alistapart.com – 3,230
- 61. Copyblogger – 3,060
- 62. getrichslowly.org – 3,050
- 63. Blogstorm.co.uk – 2,970
- 64. guykawasaki.com – 2,870
- 65. SEOmoz – 2,940
- 66. PickTheBrain.com – 2,880
- 67. simplehelp.net – 2,390
- 68. ririanproject.com2,260
- 69. imagechan.org – 2,110
- 70. ProBlogger – 2,030
- 71. profit42.com – 1,970
- 72. racketboy.com – 1,910
- 73. John Chow – 1,860
- 74. Scobleizer – 1,690
- 75. Marketing Pilgrim – 1,600
- 76. DesignVitality.com – 1,420
- 77. gameriot.com – 1,410
- 78. whenpenguinsattack.com1,370
- 79. Shoemoney – 1,260
- 80. Dailygaming.net – 1,170
- 81. roscripts.com – 1,130
- 82. wowinsider.com – 1,070
- 83. micahville.com – 1,020
- 84. Matt Cutts – 851
Some of you might be thinking that due to the way the Digg archives work this list will favour sites that have been on the Digg homepage recently. This is clearly the case but if I was Google I would want to rank sites that are popular now rather than sites that were popular a few months ago. Perhaps thats why hitting the front page of social media sites gives an immediate boost in search engine rankings.
Whats your Digg saturation? If it’s more than Matt Cutts on 851 add a comment below and I’ll update the list.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
{ 68 comments… read them below or add one }
Interesting post. I just checked my site. PickTheBrain is at 2,870.
your list is sorely lacking. Kotaku.com has 33,300 results and is not on your list.
Nice way to measure digg success. I never thought of this.
My site, simplehelp.net, has 2,800.
My site, micahville.com, has 1,020..
Jalopnik – 17,400
Mine, ohgizmo.com, is at 5,060.
That should put me at #32…
I hope to get us up there soon. We’re close with 675. OnMyList, The only place to list your pants off.
My site, profit42.com has a digg saturation of 1910, would be great if you added it to the list.
imagechan has 2,210
Also an image from it is the 35th most dugg article ever
Here’s a few:
timesonline.co.uk
dailymail.co.uk
I could go on all day.
Wired has 43,300
My site has seen the Digg affect quite a bit. According to Google my site, DesignVitality.com, has 2,160 which puts me higher than Matt Cutts and quite a few more on your list.
Inhabitat has 5,460.
John,
I bet if you were to hit ctrl-f and type ‘Kotaku.com’ you would find it nestled just below treehugger and just above macrumors at number 13 on the list with 33,500
Just checked two that should have hit the list:
FileFront.com – 10,200
GamerNode.com – 7,800
mine has 1360, whenpenguinsattack.com
racketboy.com has 1,800
Destructoid has 27,200
http://www.microsoft.com, 20,500
.
Somehow not in the list
Way to miss Maddox, his articles regularly make it to the front page of digg, and his iPhone one alone has over 14,000 diggs (posted about a month ago).
Dailygaming.net has around 1100. It’d be at the very bottom, but it’s still there.
Hey we beat Matt Cutts! I work for Gameriot.com
1,420.
Maddox doesn’t have enough saturation for the list.
myspace.com
facebook.com
break.com
wikipedia.org
msn.com
just read alexa.com if you want to have a comprehensive list.
Cracked?
XKCD?
Surely these belong.
http://www.tumbl.us has a saturation 4,520
Uh, MSN.com has almost 60,000. What’s the point of this unless you input every website on the internet. Your list only contains the sites that came to your mind while making it.
Daniel, I see MSN.com at 36,400. Maybe you are hitting a different Google datacenter or something.
If you want to suggest some sites that are missing please feel free. I made the list based on my own knowledge as a long term Digg user and by looking at the Technorati top blogs.
WoW Insider, 1130.
670 + 342 (I have a domain alias that ppl submit as well)
paulstamatiou.com + pstam.com
so I guess you could say my saturation is 1012
Who cares about Digg? A bunch of navel-gazing douches.
http://menshealth.com has 8,730
Cool list! You missed wikiHow, which would have been #37 on the list with 11,300.
It’s a nice idea, but you’re not measuring it correctly. Right now, you’re simply searching for any pages that Digg that have the domains as words on the pages, not as links. I mean, look at [site:digg.com yahoo.com]. That’s bringing up pages where people are putting in yahoo.com email addresses, among other things. Plus, in other cases, you’re getting pages that have links from profiles rather than stories.
A better way would be to do something like this.
OK, that’s searching Digg itself for all stories to the youtube.com URL. Look at the bottom, and you’ll see there are around 1525 pages of results, 10 stories per page, so a saturation of 15,250 stories. Tick the buried option if you want to get more accurate. Even better, you might scrap and total the raw number of Diggs earned for all stories. Now that would be a metric — which site has the most cumulative Diggs over time.
littlegreenfootballs.com has 10,100
My site is Get Rich Slowly, and it has a saturation of 3,800!
techdirt.com 10,600
Check out natewhitehill.com He’ll soon pass up John Chow and Pro Blogger no problem. He own’s blogdesign.com which is taking off. Profits up over 1000% in first month!!
I thought my site got a lot of Diggs, but that’s wild… # 12
Wow, this is a very different concept. I never thought to check for Digg links to see if a site is spam or not. Great article.
Danny, I agree that posting Yahoo email addresses will skew the data but I was trying to measure the popularity of a domain by seeing how many times it was mentioned on Digg, not just how many times it was Dugg. The two are not going to produce the same results.
Also I wanted to bring up results that would be very easy for Google to incorporate into the algorithm, totalling the raw number of Diggs wouldn’t be as easy.
Finally there are some sites that are always Dugg by the same group of people which would mean less Digg saturation using my method. Sites that have Diggs from a wide range of people would appear in more categories and in more peoples profiles and therefore should be thought of as more popular.
Josh, Nate might be great at designing blogs but his Digg saturation is only 185 so he doesn’t make the list.
Nice concept, my blog ririanproject.com has 2280.
BBspot.com has 5,710.
i cant find mine anywhere …
guess i need to work on it better …
spend some time informing people of my blog …
hehe …
You use to be able to do this with MSN Search using linkfromdomain… alas they shut it down due to spammers (and broke a lot of end user efforts, very lame). Read more at http://blogs.msdn.com/andyed/archive/2006/10/17/search-macros-recap.aspx
linuxtracker.org has 2070.
mine has 1,800
racketboy.com
Hi Patrick! Thanks for this, but I’d like to address one thing:
>>totalling the raw number of Diggs wouldn’t be as easy.
Well, here it is for you! Top 100 Sites on Digg.com ordered by the Nett No. of Diggs. Hope you find it useful…
Phoronix.com has 5,390 in Google at Digg.
My best friend’s dog’s uncle’s sister-in-law’s horses’ barn manager’s site has 324234 links: http://www.gabbr.com
Techcrunch has this story as
who spams digg the most
some of those on this list are very ethical and would never be likely to spam
HowtoForge has 7,520.
itsecurity.com at 1250
mine is at 487 link
It would be interesting to compare rankings for submissions to homepages
Adobe has 6,400.
EcoGeek.org has 8,320
Great post idea with some interesting stats, good work.
interesting way of looking at things – my site pfadvice.com comes in a 1,140
Great little article. I found it very amusing.
I checked, and it looks like One Man’s Blog is currently sitting at 1,930.
I had to check it like 3 times because I couldn’t believe it… but it’s there.
Incidentally, I’ve got a way you can embed this search in your page, so drop me an e-mail and I’ll share it with you. I’m going to link to your post including an embedded search in OMB tomorrow morning.
Take care, and thanks for the amusement.
John P.
Interesting post, these stats are really useful.
Interesting, your numbers are about 20% lower than I am seeing. A few examples:
engadget 355,000
wikipedia 126,000
macrumors 34,900
Perhaps the difference is I am querying google US
I discovered websites with more relevant and helpful contents than those that hit on the front page of Digg, but these sites are never noticed because they don’t belong to the culture of Digg and the West, perhaps.
I love this little article, nice idea and great job on gathering the statistics..
Yuvi has a nice example too in his site above
mecozz.com is at 509,112
I love the list, Digg is a great site and everyone should be using it. I hope I can get my Digg numbers up before everyone else gets too far ahead of me.
very interesting information!
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