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Natural vs. Unnatural Patterns on DiggMay 04 2007 | Social Networks |
It’s amazing to me that many people still believe that this can work on Digg:
- Setup a bunch of accounts (either on the same day or within a few days of eachother)
- Have your friends or employees do the same
- Go digg a few stories to make it look like you are real users
- Submit your story to Digg a day later
- Have all of said friends digg your story
- Sit back and wait to hit the homepage
I hate to break it to you but this does not work and its just so obvious to Digg admins (and even vigilant users). Here’s what a naturally dugg story will typically look like (click image for larger version):
Hypothetically, here’s what the scenario I detailed at the start will usually look like (again click for larger image):
As you can see, most of the people that have dugg this story:
- Have similar sounding names
- Have not bothered to change the default profile picture
When someone (Digg admin for example) see this in the Upcoming section - it can make them suspicious and most likely lead to a bury (yes - they do manual buries). Because if someone was to look closer they would also see that many of these accounts were created within a few days of each other (another bad sign).
This is not a steadfast rule because many times it does not hold true for stories from popular blogs (where users hit the Digg This button). But if someone is trying to get a questionable blog/website popular - this is not the way to go.
Posted by Chris Winfield at 10:20 am
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6 Responses to “ Natural vs. Unnatural Patterns on Digg ”
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kelvin newman says:
May 8th, 2007 at 7:33 amI wouldn’t be surpised if IP address had something to do with their algo too. Say a story has more than 25% of it’s diggs from the same ip address it would get one automatic bury or something similar.
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Chris Winfield says:
May 8th, 2007 at 10:37 pmKelvin -
I am almost positive that plays a big role - very good point to raise…
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kelvin newman says:
May 9th, 2007 at 4:55 amWould be an interesting experiment to try
a story gets fifty diggs from same ip
vs
story gets fifty diggs from friends different ip
vs
story gets fifty diggs from different ips all first time digg users.
i’d do if I were a bit less busy
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David Leonhardt says:
May 9th, 2007 at 10:05 amThis is looking a lot like the what-not-to-do list for SEO. But the corollery is also that there are ways to use company employees to get high Digg rankings by signing up over time, by encouraging employees to participate, occasional reminders to different employees at different times, by specifying home email addresses rather than company email addresses, by reminding them to upload an avatar of any kind, by asking them to add friends who seem to interest them (nudge them, but make it natural-looking by being natural). If the company has more than one office or is a virtual company or has a number of appropriate suppliers, the IP address issue becomes irrelevent.
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Jake Matthews says:
May 10th, 2007 at 12:06 pmtoo many puppets in the theater.
May 4th, 2007 at 2:11 pm
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