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 – <a href=”http://www.google.com/search?hl