WebProNews

Rose has responded to allegations that a cabal of Digg users actively and effectively bury any stories they disagree with, especially those that criticize Digg. Digg has its critics, particularly among the SEO community. So when a story by Muhammed Saleem appeared at Pronet Advertising citing proof of a 'bury brigade' in action, others were quick to jump on the story. Saleem cited David LeMieux and his efforts to gather information from Digg Spy through its JSON array. That hole allowed LeMieux to post who was burying what stories on Digg, and for what reason. That explosive revelation looked pretty damning. But after the kerfuffle had settled a little, a couple of other items became known. First, LeMieux backtracked on his research, in a comment added to the Digg story about the bury brigade:

Yeah, the real to false ratio was about 1:4 so one out of every 4 burries was actually committed by the user. They have apparently fixed the hole, and quite quickly too.

Today, Digg's Rose clarified the bury brigade issue, and the blocking of sites by Digg when they deem it necessary:

For the same reason that we don’t expose all of our back-end methodologies for the Digg promotional algorithm, we also don’t expose the details of how the burying algorithm works. We spend a lot of time analyzing our data and understanding how people Digg and bury content. We have spent the last 2.5 yrs building systems that ensure a diverse group of users promote or bury stories. For what it’s worth, and to shift the blame off of the users listed here - quite a bit of this data was gathered inaccurately as the author states in the Digg comments. Please also note, due to the massive number of Diggs/submissions/buries and comments, Digg spy only shows a portion of the activity within Digg at any time. I also want to point out a couple of important changes to the way Digg blocks URLs that have been reported by our users repeatedly as SPAM or that violate the Digg Terms of Service. We have tweaked some systems so that Digg is now able to be much more granular in the way it blocks offending content, so that Digg don’t necessarily need to block entire domains or subdomains. Apologies to any sites we’ve inconvenienced with our previous system.

While the blocking resolution should be of some benefit, thoughts of a bury brigade will persist if SEO stories continue to get routinely buried. There isn't a way for Digg to fix that algorithmically, if enough people choose to bury a story. ---