Is Digg exchange trend healthy?
Digg.com is a famous social bookmarking website where webmasters announce new news and articles on their website and other users digg it (in other words bookmark it) and when a particular topic is dugg by a user, it gets added in his profile list. This concept was introduced due to the increase in the total number of blogs and search engines could not index the hot news from the blogs as soon as it was released. Using these bookmarking services, Webmasters can announce hot news and opinions and visitors will know what has taken place immediately.
The more an article is Dugg, the more popular it gets. Hence webmasters are always looking towards getting their articles Dugg and sometimes the webmasters use unfair methods to increase the popularity of their article. I personally believe Digg exchange is one of the unfair practices. Webmasters usually need about 30 diggs to get their article into the Hot section of any upcoming news, from there it will get a lot of exposure and may come into the main Popular section.
This is one type of spam (I gave it a shot just to see what happens and believe me I got a lot of Diggs but I can’t say the same about the visitors), articles which actually deserve some attention is pushed down and articles that don’t are brought into popular section. Digg has fought with lot of Digg Exchange websites, one of them being Diggboss.com, now the one which is popular is Diggfreak.com which pays for Digging other articles. I am sure by the end of this year Digg will target Diggfreak.com too and maybe remove all the Digg exchange websites.
You can see a clear point that the owners of Digg make in the Terms of Service
with the intention of artificially inflating or altering the ‘digg count’, blog count, comments, or any other Digg service, including by way of creating separate user accounts for the purpose of artificially altering Digg’s services; giving or receiving money or other remuneration in exchange for votes; or participating in any other organized effort that in any way artificially alters the results of Digg’s services
This shows that Digg is trying to reduce things like Digg exchange.
November 9th, 2007 at 12:59 am
Being that I am a webmaster, I do use Digg, Stumbleupon and forms of social bookmarking. I have never used digg to promote any of my sites. Actually, I use it to keep up with current events. I have participated in several stumble exchanges on various webmaster forums to help get some of my idea out there. I do not think it is unfair unless you are pushing “garbage.”
November 9th, 2007 at 6:45 am
Digg exchange is usually done with garbage or stuff that people won’t digg. It’s more like a method to push your topic into the popular zone.
November 9th, 2007 at 10:18 pm
I agree with you there but there are a few exceptions.
April 11th, 2008 at 11:17 am
It is one of things I can never understand … how people can think that way. It’s so illogical that it can only be based upon moronity.