Digg Gaming: How to Spot it

It was always inevitable that people would try to game Digg by copying original articles & trying to pass them off as their own & also engineering articles towards the Digg userbase in order to increase popularity & incoming links to their website.

This article will give a few examples of Digg Gaming in action & how to spot it.

The first article worth reading is over at SEOmoz, called the anatomy of a Super Digg. In the article daniel explains exactly how he gamed Digg users with an article written purely to grab their interest.

The article was called 8 Diseases That Give You Superhuman Powers

If you visit the url that the original article was hosted on you’ll notice a few things that are strange:

• The article is hosted on the domain www.autoadviceoffl.com which if you visit it, it’s is a car dealership in Florida:

Why on earth someone who owned a car dealership would write an article like this & publish it on their own site? Yeah well, we all know why.

The story received over 4000 Diggs & the article itself gained about 920 backlinks almost doubling the total backlink count of the main domain. In the SEO world, this would have a substantial effect on the overall rankings of the domain. Regardless of whether the article was on topic or not. Some SEO’s will also use a 301 permanent redirect on the page to redirect it to one of their own sites, hence passing all the link popularity across (once the traffic has died down).

Now have a look at the article itself

• The article is now clearly plastered with SEO’d links leading to other articles & sites about Limousines (trying to pass the link juice to help them rank).

Also have a look at the user profile of the submitter. You’ll notice that it took over 20 tries of submitting articles before one finally got popular. Talk about persistance?

Looking at the popular stories from the past 7 days, I noticed a similar story:

Geeky Wedding Cakes : This story is hosted on a Limousine website, which isn’t linked anywhere from the main domain. The site is also heavily SEO’d which leads me to believe this is someone trying to game Digg (quite successfully).

Things that these stories all have in common

1. They are all hosted on a commerical domain.
2. The Sites have been heavily SEO’d (I don’t expect you to be able to recognise this), but look for SEO’d title tags like Rent Cars in Florida or Hire Limousine for Prom.
3. The article had been submitted 2-3 times before & had been unsuccessful. The author merely changed the URL & submitted again.
4. The articles are not linked from anywhere else on the domain, they are standalone. So how would someone else other than the author be able to find them to submit them?
5. The articles are all written to entice & capture the attention of the Digg culture by focusing on topics that are popular often (i.e. Lists, Pictures, Apple, Science).

Now of course there’s ways around this detection technique, I’ll cover that in a later post