Search Advisory

To round out the top three most-used social bookmarking sites, we’ll cover Digg today.  Like Delicious, Digg is a site where you can post bookmarks and access them from any computer.  But Digg’s focus is really on news-sharing, as well as sharing videos and images.

You can submit your own news items and (optimized) press releases, and you can put search terms in the title (which becomes a link – hello, anchor text!) and description.  Submissions are listed on the Digg site in order of the number of “diggs” they get from readers (having a lot of comments helps too).  Web pages that get a lot of diggs and rank high on Digg’s site can get tons of traffic, at least until they get bumped off by the next hot news item.

A few warnings about Digg…many of its users are youngish males who tend toward the technical side.  So those are the types of items that tend to rank highest.  Digg users also seem to hate search marketers.  So if you submit an overly-optimized web page or appear to be trying to “game their system,” they will “bury” your submission (a bury is the opposite of a digg).

Digg does not pass along link juice, since the web pages open within a Digg frame.  So Digg has limited uses for SEO purposes unless you’ve got a really interesting, newsworthy item.  Otherwise, given the lack of link juice and the need for many, many diggs, this is a site you can probably put toward the bottom of your priority list.