I just came across an excellent post by our neighbor just South of the 49th parallel. Basically there has been a lot of chatter recently about Digg, and other social network news websites. Let's ignore all the "good vs. bad" editor talk and manipulation and take a brief look at Rand's post from a purely algorithm perspective.
For those of you not familiar with Digg and the like. Let me explain why the SEO community cares so much. Basically these sites have a couple of major benefits.
- They can drive thousands of visitors and generate excellent industry buzz (if your story gets promoted properly) – short term benefit.
- They can create hundreds of quality back links which will help your site rank organically – long term benefit.
Lately there have been plenty of posts about how to write a good Digg story, so lets focus on the math.
Basically stories get ranked based on the following algorithmic criteria.
- Number of votes over time
- Domain of link
- Profile of submitter
- Profiles of voters
- Timing of submission
- Similarity to other links (duplicate)
- Source of votes
- Manual review as it hits the homepage
- Number of comments
- Number of views
- Down votes
- Source of Votes
Rand has gone in to more detail in his blog – read his full post here. I felt that this information should also be posted here as there has been a lot of discussion inside our company about Digg and their competitors, so I thought posting this might help clarify how Digg works.
