I hear a lot of people say that by submitting sites to Digg they will get a huge amount of traffic. This could not be further from the truth. Digg is no longer based on the quality of your submissions, but by how many friends you have on the site (limited exceptions). You can submit the best article in the world, but if you have no friends, you get no exposure, and you get no Diggs, meaning that your submission dies. If you look at Digg front page submissions, I would bet that almost all of them are submitted by the top 200 users. These top 200 users don't even have to try to get Diggs, their social media pals Digg the articles up almost immediately. In the future, I would love to see Digg die as a marketing tool because it is just being manipulated to the advantage of the minority of power holding users. So, post your opinions, have you ever generated decent exposure from Digg, or got an article on the front page? Do you agree with me or disagree?
You're right Digg doesn't generate hits if your article doesn't hit the mainpage. Then again who needs the crappy Digg traffic anyway? Use Digg to index new URLs fast.
zexy is right. I am also using digg mainly for indexing purposes of my site. It is good to use in that way because it has a higher rank and also it is producing do-follow links.
Yes, you two are right, that is basically the only way Digg is beneficial. I just wish people would stop thinking that it is a great way to build traffic because it is not.
Its good for indexing, everything else is crap since you need to get on the front page and we all know who is in charge of that.
The only way it is really helping to get traffic is via search engines. If your niche is very popular, the SE traffic will go to Digg, then they will click to your site through that. At first, I thought posting there was taking traffic away from my site...until looking more closely at the statistics.
I never thought of it that way Claymation, but I can see where you are coming from. It is better to have a person click on a Digg link and have a chance at coming through to your site then to have them go to a competitors site .
Just make sure you have tons of unique and interesting content for your users on your website. On top of that, add few social bookmarking buttons near that content. This will make it natural and you wont have to worry about anything else. As soon as you stop being natural Google will notice it
Yep I have placed a few stories on the front page for some of my websites and I think the CTR was 0.14%. It basically ate up the sites bandwidth with little to no effect on overall cashflow or even backlinks. Digg is kind of a myth in my opinion because so many webmasters think it is the holy grail but then once they have had a few articles dugg to a front page they cry about how they made no money and it crashed their servers. Social bookmarking can help but overall its not that great.
When you really think about it, the point is NOT to make the front page...aka "Kiss of Death"....for your server costs. I'm very comfortable with getting the redirected traffic from relevant searches, rather than curiosity clickers on Digg. So, overall it is very helpful. Let me point out that most of my articles on Digg have no more than 1-3 votes, almost no comments, yet they bring over a thousand visitors a week to my site(s).
Yes, this is the only way that Digg is useful. Anyone that comes from Digg's front page is just going to spend a few seconds on your site and click back to Digg to look for the next story.
I have kind of changed my mind. As Claymation has stated, it is good because the Digg submission ranks high in the search rankings. This then redirects traffic to your site.
If you want a lot of diggs just friend these people ... http://www.google.com/search?q="mutual+friendship"+site:digg.com
Frankly speaking, if you use digg to drive traffic to your website, you need many digg's friend. Your article must be get digg as soon as possible so that it can stay at the homepage. This is the only way to drive traffic to your website