by Alan Rabinowitz
Editor’s note: This post is old. Clearly Digg doesn’t have the same value it once did, however, it did make some famous marketers because they were top diggers!
We’re in a day and age where buzz travels online faster than the speed of search. Is news and buzz becoming more desired than static search results?
Here’s an interesting topic for discussion from a marketing perspective. Is it Google marketing gone haywire and sending millions to Digg it! Where do you become famous? Which Top 10 ranking is better? Where is most of today’s traffic coming from? Is Google making a mistake by popularizing Digg for SEO, or is it a marketing strategy?
When every SEO starts talking and buzzing and blogging and spending more time concerned with Digg, then we need to stop and look at what may be happening.
Back in 1999 many SEO’s were able to get their clients to the top of Google in a relatively short period, so immediately they started talking about just how relevant their results were. Buzz started, and the Search Engine became popular and a trend. Now people are Google obsessed, but lately, all I hear about is Digg. So we may be seeing a trend.
Digg is making people famous in a short period, and so is blogging, Technorati and Myspace, so much so that more traffic seems to be coming from these social websites than comes from Google. Can this be true? According to Hitwise, Myspace had more traffic than Google in September and October 2006. Is this a backfire of Google suggesting to everyone to become writers and top bloggers in order to get top rankings? Is Google ranking now based on social popularity like Direct Hit (failed search portal that died in the early 2000’s)?
Is this showing that the SEO community is more interested in interlinking blogs and getting highly ranked on Digg? A post from Matt Cutts earlier this year seems to have made SEO’s addicted to Digg.
Personally, right now a front page listing on Digg promises more traffic and the potential for fame than any search result. More average businesses are feeling the needs to go blogging to get new content and using myspace, delicious and Digg to gain traffic.
Some viral marketers have become famous from touring with Search Engine Conventions, blogging and digging. More famous than top-ranked Googlers, so a trend is appearing to emerge with social sites and the fact that Google is promoting them by stating that linkbait is acceptable, as a matter of fact, the article seems to suggest that linkbaiting on social sites is the only acceptable link popularity building practice, that and spending hours answering questions for people on other business sites. Unless they are planning on buying these sites, they should second guess their current push of telling everyone to linkbait with Digg.
In our opinion, we may be seeing power being handed over, but we believe Google will waive its mighty hand and purchase these social traffic pools, then again News Corp may beat them and on the social networks which spread, news, buzz and fame almost overnight. The popularity war is starting here, and all I seem to hear about now is Digg, Dugg, and Digg it.
Linkbait Definition: Giving visitors a reason to add a link, write a post in a blog, or tell someone about the site in question, put it on a popular portal for traffic and see if visitors link to it. SEO technique approved by Google.