SEOs Claim Digg Auto-Buries Stories

Smoldering embers have ignited another blaze of controversy around Digg and its treatment of SEO websites. Last time, it was Lee Odden dealing with his domain being banned from Digg, as were other SEO sites.

Now the context of the game has shifted, as Neil Patel accused Digg of burying stories internally. He may have found the proverbial smoking gun this time.

"We all know that the main reason why stories don’t hit the Digg homepage is because they get buried," Patel said. "Well last week we did a test on Pronet Advertising that shows Digg might be burying stories internally."

A story they submitted as a test was buried after about 20 Diggs. Patel has a link to a document showing 10,000 buries made by Digg users for that day. None of them appear to have buried the story, and our search for the story in the list of buries didn’t turn up Patel’s test.

According to Patel, the last referrer to the story’s page came from crawl3.digg.internal. Then the story was buried. This seems to indicate the bury happened internally, either by a Digg insider or through an algorithmic test.

Reaction from the SEO community was predictably critical of Digg. Andy Hagans at Tropical SEO saw a couple of his stories apparently receive the same treatment recently.

"It appears from the evidence that the Digg staff are big fat hairy liars," he said of his experience and Patel’s findings.