This weekend I was trying to introduce a few of my offline friends to Digg without too much success.
Most of them are not interested in the latest iPhone news (its not hit the UK yet) and have never heard of linux so I spent some time customising the Digg homepage with topics that might interest them.
Even after doing this they all said that Digg was rubbish. Why? Because most of the time its just a page full of broken links. Aside from the big gadget blogs and tech blogs most sites crash under the weight of the Digg effect making it very hard for anybody to actually read what’s there. None of my friends understood why websites crashed as soon as they hit the Digg front page, most just assumed the link was wrong.
Don’t be a broken link
Yesterday blogstorm.co.uk had 75,000 unique visitors and the uptime was 100.00% for the day. Its hosted on a shared account costing $20 per month. If you are serious about making a living online you simply have to be able to stand up to hitting the Digg front page.
All the hard work you put into linkbait can be ruined when your blog is down for the entire time its on Digg.
Read this guide to surviving the Digg effect and make sure it doesn’t happen to you.
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.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
I can understand why some people think that Digg sucks but it is very useful to those who use it regularly, or who know how to use it to generate tons of traffic. Most of it is noise, I agree to that.
While I agree that borken links on digg suck … I think the biggest problem with said social network is its cliquishness.
In many cases, unless you’re a disdainful hipster with at least 2 tats and 1 piercing who hates Microsoft as much as you hate GWB then you’re not likely to get the nod from a majority of their readers.
Hi
I am working on a site which try to solve many of the problems with digg.com.
You can find it on http://crowdnews.eu.
The main problem with digg is the voting system.
When only top voted stories get on the front page it has
to be a subject that many can relate to,
which result in stories with a low information content.
http://crowdnews.eu solves this by using sharing instead of voting.
Every have a personal news page on which they can subscribe to other users and when those users share stories they will appear on the personal news page.
Crowdnews
I somewhat agree. I have been a regular user of digg, and what’s sad to see is sometimes vry good stories get buried and very illogical stories keep getting dugg because in general, the top users control 75% of digg postings. So, it’s not really what people want to read, it’s more like what these top users force you to read.
This post is right on the money. Trivial and bubble-gum stories on the front page and insanely frustrating broken links and what-not. I stopped visiting months ago…..it’s had its day in the sun (and they know it too!)
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