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.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the main event. Let’s get ready to optimize!

In this corner, weighing in at about $25 million thanks to his Weblogs Inc sale to AOL, Jason "The Brooklyn Bulldog" Calacanis! He’s criticized the SEO industry and steps into the ring ready to defend his position.

In the other corner, weighing in with numerous blog posts and plenty of ideas about SEO, the challenger, Neil "Traffic Driver" Patel! He offered to boost search-driven traffic to Calacanis’ site by at least 10 to 20 percent within 30 days of implementing changes to the site.

We go to our analyst at ringside to see how the challenger has fared with his efforts. How do you see the bout so far, Max?

So far the Traffic Driver is looking good against the Brooklyn Bulldog. Here’s how Patel says the challenge has worked out in the early minutes of the contest:

We had 6 (not 7) full days of analytical tracking before the first SEO changes were set in place….calacanis.com received 6149 search engine hits between February 21st and February 26th.

Currently SEO changes are still being made and around 10% of them have been made so far which has resulted in 7,449 search engine visitors between March 14th and March 19th. This proves that there was a 21.14% increase in search traffic…

Patel is feeling so confident, he isn’t predicting a 10 or 20 percent gain for Calacanis. Said Patel, "When everything is done I estimate a 50% or so increase in search traffic."

Won’t that be something if the challenger can put the champ down with a haymaker? A 50 percent gain has to be a knockout punch in this match.

The Truth About SEO To Be Revealed?

That came from Neil Patel, who thought Jason needed to learn a little more about SEO before being so judgmental. Neil placed a challenge into the blogosphere, right where Jason could see it:

So to you Jason, I offer the following challenge: I can take your blog and increase your daily search traffic by a minimum of 10 to 20% after 30 days of putting my changes into effect. I will NOT be doing anything "shady" or unethical and will even point out all the changes that will be made to your blog. You can even have your own designer/programmer make the changes to your blog; I will even layout everything for them using step-by-step instructions.

As well as increasing your traffic I would like to educate you about SEO and what it is really about. There are tons of great and ethical SEOs that help companies increase their traffic without doing anything against the guidelines of search engines.

Jason later posted a followup comment accepting Neil’s offer, writing, "OK, I’m game… but only if you are 100% transparent about what you’re doing and you do no shady/gaming stuff."

Maybe this would put the whole SEO kerfuffle in abeyance until Neil gets his shot at cleaning up Jason’s site and making it a lot ‘smarter’ in SEO terms. But the video another Pronet blogger, Muhammad Saleem, posted that got things rolling has elicited a compare-and-contrast response from WebGuerilla’s Greg Boser.

He compares the service offered by the video’s speaker, Gary Ruplinger, to those provided by Neil and by CopyBlogger’s Brian Clark. Greg finds that the concept of promoting a site to social bookmarking services for a fee is pretty much the same between all three, but he is careful to make a distinction between Gary and Neil & Brian:

Now please don’t think I’m suggesting that either Brian or Neil are on the same level as our buddy “Video Gary.” I’m not. They are both really smart guys who are very good at what they do.

What I am saying is “Video Gary” is a product of their (Social Media Marketing) industry, not mine. You just can’t have it both ways. Once you get to the point where you have an acronym that describes what you do, you have to take responsibility for those in your acronym who suck.

One of Greg’s commentors, Neil’s co-worker Cameron Olthuis, wrote that Gary really is not a SMM spammer. "I don’t think wonderboy Gary was suggesting the submissions for the traffic, in fact he was suggesting it for the links. So he is, after all, just an SEO spammer."

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I recommended “Gene and Georgetti’s” and somehow we ended up at “Dick’s”, one of those places where the wait staff are intentionally rude and give poor service. The service was actually great, the food as good as could be expected and the conversation and experience was all around fun. There was a Janis Joplin cover by the band that went pretty well too.

We ended things up back at Kitty O’Shea’s where a good number of search marketers were hitting it late and I met a few very interesting people who I did not get business cards from, but learned some interesting things about domainers and domain name monetization, AdWords arbitrage and affiliate marketing. I may need to change some of my planned sessions to cover on Monday! Now it’s off to sleep until day one of SES Chicago.

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Lee Odden is President and Founder of
TopRank Online Marketing, specializing in organic SEO, blog
marketing and online public relations. He’s been cited as a search
marketing expert by publications including U.S. News & World Report and
The Economist and has implemented successful search marketing programs
with top BtoB companies of all sizes. Odden shares his marketing
expertise at Online Marketing Blog offering
daily news, interviews and best practices.