If You’re Not Cheating Digg for Traffic, You’re Not Trying
No questions about it, Digg, StumbleUpon and other social bookmarking sites deliver great traffic. Depending on how viral your post may be, you can expect either a handful of visits or if the content proves to be viral or even controversial enough, tons of it.
I have been doing a lot of experimenting with both Digg and StumbleUpon for the past few months, submitting the best articles that I could find and also voting for other people’s submitted posts. In recent weeks I have received thousands (in some cases tens-of-thousands of visitors a day) swarming to view a particular post of mine if it grew in popularity. Some of these posts have been truly newsworthy, while admittedly, others have been a bit more on the informational and “tips” related side, which still works to a certain degree. The fact is, regardless of how many people you have visiting your sites, by simply submitting your latest posts or articles to social sites, you will see an increase in backlinks coming from these sites and others. These backlinks are quickly spotted in Yahoo! and other search engines and helps establish your site as an authority on a particular subject.
Getting Greedy: Greed is good, right? Well, like any popular site or search engine, there are aggressive marketers and 
spammers, whether white or black hat that will naturally either try to toe the line for increased results, or downright spam the hell out of what they might consider a loop hole in the system. We’ve seen it in the past with SEO, in the beginning, the basic white-on-white text on HTML pages stuffed with important keywords, that eventually led to more sophisticated cloaking/doorway pages to actually feed search engines a neatly “stuffed” page of content, while showing a visitor something else that looked less spammy. That was all fun until you realize that it really isn’t worth it. Creating the best user experience is what will ultimately get a user to keep coming back to your site.
The same greed is encountered with Digg, where marketers, jerks, spammers (and myself, I guess I fit into one of these categories, maybe all three?) are looking for a way to get their posts to appear on Digg’s valuable homepage for optimal traffic. Digg introduced a “Share” button where you converse with “friends” and “shout” out stories that are of interest. Well, if you have a good amount of friends associated to your Digg account, it is only natural and instinctual for a beast like myself to start wondering what would happen if I shouted out to 500 people everyday to check out my latest post. This will work for a little while, but eventually, people get annoyed, and more importantly to someone like myself, Digg does too. The bastahds actually seemed to take away my ability to “shout” to other Digg users for a few hours, until finally giving back the capability to shout again. Warning sign? Maybe, which is comedy in itself, but a lesson learned. I still receive the Diggs and traffic that I believe I deserve, but I am being extra careful with the way I approach it.
Overall, the moral of this story is that in a time of always pushing the envelope, having beloved football coaches caught cheating (just a little bit though, but no one was/will be stopping the Patriots this year anyways), and having familiar phrases like ”if you aren’t cheating, you aren’t trying” being all too familiar, when dealing with social sites, it’s best to remember the consequences and truly concentrate on what matters most with a website: delivering the best and most relevant content possible for qualified visits.
I still think that shouting out to 500 people was fun while it lasted though.
