Digg 4 Is a New Aggregator

At least that is what it is meant to be, based upon my understanding – the site now has content from major publishers being fed by RSS to the site.

Most publishers seem to be opting to submit all their content
I added a feed for selected posts to be fed there which might be suitable for a wider audience

But there are things which really shouldn’t be there.

Techmeme

I love Techmeme, I think it is a great news aggregator, but nearly all the stories – especially the lead stories are duplicates of existing content that is being fed to Digg.
It is just the way it is with Techmeme – sure there are the occasional stories that make it to Techmeme by way of a tip on Twitter, but those are only occasional, and even then often are from a large site that would have made it there anyway.

I am not going to single out internet and tech cebebrities but for instance I have seen Google Buzz RSS feeds submitted.

On one such post I saw this

Pretty clear instructions, and later down there were instructions on how to find posts from Reddit.com

http://digg.com/search?q=site:reddit.com

Sure enough that brings up lots of Reddit stories

And these stories are making it to the front page – even blindly

Effect on Digg Home Page

7 of the 10 stories on the home page are links to Reddit

Will Kevin Rose Offer an Olive Branch?

I don’t think so… at least not yet.

• There is no such thing as bad publicity
• Digg is gaining a lot of good publicity with the people it wants to attract – the people who were not Digg elite
• Digg will end up with their button back on tons of blogs and news media sites that previously abandoned them for Twitter – free advertising as soon as a story is published.
• Casual users will either get
  • News from their friends and personal selection = dumbed down crippled feed reader
  • A front page that updates a few 1000 times per day.
• The Digg elite (who grew Digg) will either get used to the idea, be thrown some kind of bone or will defect to Reddit or Mixx or other communities (many ex-Diggers such as Zaibatsu are huge on Twitter.

Digg On Reddit

Nice welcome message for new mmembers who had never heard of Reddit
A little gloating about owning the fron page of Digg – (they have as much right as Techmeme to be there)
Some interesting traffic stats

Digg Inbox Zero

Over the last few days I have been maintaining “Inbox Zero” in my Digg account, just hiding every story (some after I Dugg them)
Most of the people I still follow are fairly inactive on Digg, so the amount of stories was quite small.

Today for some reason I can’t get the “hide” button to work – almost like it has been disabled.

Will I be adding Digg buttons here?

No idea… maybe I will have a vote for it when things settle down a little. I also need to do the same for Sphinn.

I am also evaluating what to do with 3 Reddits I set up 2 years ago
WordPress (lowercase P dammit)
Blogging
Internet Marketing

Oh and just to be a little ironic – more on Techmeme

I am not going to get into complicated internal linking sturctures, or even discuss things like nofollow and robots.txt

This will be just SEO 101 that any webmaster should know.

1. Title Tag

Used on Digg

<title>Digg - Topsy Search &amp; Twitter Backups</title>

Most SEOs think that keyword prominence is important for both ranking and click-through rate thus this title would be much better as:-

<title>Topsy Search &amp; Twitter Backups @ Digg</title>

5/10 but no banana

2. Meta Keywords

The keywords meta tag is only used by Yahoo of the major search engines currently, but should be specific to a page.

<meta name="keywords" content="Digg, pictures, breaking news, entertainment, politics, technology, headline news, celebrity news, offbeat, world business, sports, funny videos">

Having the same keywords for every page of the site is spammy and pointless thus 0/10

3. Meta Description

The description is not used as a ranking factor by major search engine, but might be used on other websites such as Digg so can be a secondary ranking factor.
Lots of sites these days don’t set a description because they concentrate on Google, and often just decide to let Google decide on which words to use as a description within the search results for each article.

The primary benefit of having an enticing description is to boost click-through rate.

Grabbing the whole article content and slapping it into the description is not cool – 0/10

4. RDFa

RDFa is geeky SEO stuff – I don’t even really want to discuss it as most sites aren’t using it, but damn.. I can’t ignore this junk.

It looks like we have a problem – they got the title much better here (no mention of Digg) but they have taken the whole article contents and included it a second time.

RDFa if it wasn’t there wouldn’t be an issue, but as it is there, and buggered up, they get 0/10

5. URLs

Digg have always rewritten their URLs so they are nice for humans rather than a bunch of parameters, but they should really fix the word seperators. Google does not treat an underscore as a space.

http://digg.com/news/technology/topsy_search_twitter_backups

No improvement thus 5/10

6. Links

Google like links – links are what powers the relevance in their search engines. If Google can trust the links then having them on a page is often a good thing. Linking to good resources has been mentioned by Google Engineer Matt Cutts as a positive ranking factor.
Some websites don’t trust their users to post good links so they stick rel=”nofollow” attributes in the code to tell Google and other search engines that the links can’t be trusted.

<div class="columns  group">
                <input type="hidden" id="item_id" value="20100826002508:946ca73a-0f8f-4d8f-8493-b4cbffbc9be9">
    <div class="column full group" id="main-column">
        <div id="permalink-story">

             <div class="story-item item-20100826002508_946ca73a-0f8f-4d8f-8493-b4cbffbc9be9 group" ><div class="media group"><div class="digg-btn has-tooltip item-20100826002508_946ca73a-0f8f-4d8f-8493-b4cbffbc9be9"><a href="http://andybeard.eu/3001/topsy-search-twitter-backups.html" target="_blank"><span class="digg-count"><span>1</span></span><span class="digg-count-label">diggs</span></a><a class="digg-it group""><span>digg<span class="digg-btn-icon"></span></span></a><span class="digg-btn-bottom"></span></div>

It seems that Digg now trust their users to post good links… or that they trust me to post good links, or they have decided my domain is trusted and this link was generatd from my official feed import. This could also be oversight.

The link itself uses the anchor text “diggs” and gets rewritten as a voting widget. That isn’t so good both for the site receiving the link, and for Digg themselves because it is hidden… though the anchor text is relevant to the widget.

It would be nice if it stays like this but don’t hold your breath. 7/10 for now

7. Canonical Part 1

Digg does not use canonical tags or 301 redirects to clean up messy URLs with extra parameters
This is an example:-

http://digg.com//news/technology/topsy_search_twitter_backups?link=12345

To fix this issue in the header Digg should use

<link rel="canonical" href="http://digg.com//news/technology/topsy_search_twitter_backups/" />

That can cause lots of issues 3/10

8. WWW – Canonical Part 2

There is a difference between these 2 URLs

http://digg.com

http://www.digg.com

They might serve the same page, but it can cause the “Gogle Juice” to be split between pages.

For years this is an issue Digg didn’t fix, but I am happy to see it has now.

Finally! 10/10 despite how long it took to fix.

9. Email Sharing Link

We seem to have another copy of my article.

This causes two problems:-

• It is more junk repeated content on the page
• Someone is going to receive an article without the images – that is a very poor reader experience

For hiding my article in code at every opportinity 0/10

10. Related Links

I am a big fan of linking to related content, either the latest on the specific story or similar topics. Whilst I am not going to pick Digg up on their internal linking structure too much, I am thinking of this from a general perspective that it is good for users and search engines. Related posts plugins and widgets are hugely popular with readers, and the equivalent on Digg would be great for content discovery.

They don’t have it at all, so no points 0/10

Total

Going into this I didn’t realise I would find so many basic issues – I am sure the Digg engineers are aware of many of them so this is just adding them to the bug reports.

I am sure someone is going to chime in about relative importance as I have valued each item the same. If I took importance into account I would probably be rating this more like 20/10

Updates

Apparently there is a lot of unrest amongst Digg users. Do check out the podcast by the Drill Down 42:30 onwards. More on Techmeme.

Jack Spirko has knocked together an interesting site where your story can appear on the front page because it is “hated” and I feel the idea is worthy of a mention.

You can see that currently the hated stories seem to only appear in the sidebar – I would love them to be integrated with the main results by default with some CSS differentiation, with “reactions” positive or negative to qualify for the front page.

Some things with the site certainly need improvement:-

• Permalinks need to be rewritten with mod_rewrite
• I like the love and hated part of the profiles, because you can add some HTML – I think many people would appreciate a simple HTML editor to be made available, there are plenty of simple javascript ones that can be applied to any text area.
• Blogs – there wasn’t a way to list blogs on the social media profile (my profile is an example) – Jack’s is much more interesting for SEOs ;)
• Tools
  • Bookmarklet – much easier to use than visiting the site
  • Javascript vote counter
  • Inclusion on popular bookmarking plugins such as Sociable (Joost’s version)
  • Feedburner Feedflares (with vote count and comments), maybe based on what Hamlet has done for Sphinn
• More submissions – some submissions are currently fed into the site from feeds
• Very clear rules, especially on things like self-promotion

I don’t intend to write about every new social news site that comes along, but Jack is a regular reader, and I enjoyed the new “twist” that he has added with this one, plus it is more links for your social media starfish, cross-promotion or whatever you wish to call it these days.
I wouldn’t expect a huge amount of traffic, I was member 99, but it does seem to be a site with quite a few dedicated users, and very few abusers.

Jack wrote more about HatedOrLoved.com over on his blog, and you can check it out here for yourself.

Note: Jack plus his other partners are advertisers here on http://AndyBeard.eu with their Marketing Ice site, but I actually had the whole article written before I even thought about that – a visit to Jack’s blog jogged my thoughts that I should add some disclosure.

Here is a challenge: I would love this post to be the most hated ever ;) That would only take 10 haters, compared to 21 “loves”

I have built up my blog to quite a large readership by writing in depth thoughtful articles.

To be honest, I am writing this not for the traffic I haven’t received, but because the stories I write about often need a different perspective, or the companies I write about are newsworthy.

Maybe my site for some reason is on autobury, though I have no idea why that might be the case. Whilst my site does cover marketing and SEO related content sometimes, I wouldn’t dream of encouraging that content to be submitted to Digg in any way.

However when I write about other topics, such as various social networks, often my coverage covers a lot more angles than is normally presented on many technology blogs. I rarely get press releases sent to me, so all the content is 100% original material based on real usage.

Take for example MyBlogLog

They are actually a competitor of Blogcatalog, a company I do some minor consulting with, but I still have more in depth coverage of everything to do with MyBlogLog than any other site, including their own blog.

I wrote an article yesterday that was a little critical of the service and their new lifestreaming, but it was constructive. I doubt anyone from the MyBlogLog team would bury it.

Whilst I was asleep, someone submitted my story to Digg
http://digg.com/software/MyBlogLog_Social_Activity_Time_Line_Disappoints

Honestly you couldn’t beg for a worse description for the story, but whilst I was asleep it gathered votes, and when I woke up I notice a small amount of traffic in my stats.

I took a glance at Digg, and I saw that there were 29 votes for the story already, and only one of the votes was from someone on my friends list. I am not a highly active Digg user, but I am a well known blogger with a large following, thus I attract friends, many of which I have not reciprocated.

I know many of the Digg top users casually mainly through other social network, but whilst at times many have been mutual friends with me on Digg, they know I am not a frequent user, thus sometimes I get removed from their friends list. I don’t look at that as any kind of negative vote – the Digg interface currently is a little awkward if you have more than 100 mutual friends listed, and it is much better to be friends with active users.

However the people voting on the story were unknown to me.

I delved a little deeper and looked at previous articles about MyBlogLog on Digg. The last story about them that went popular was over 1 year ago, and that was when Shoemoney was banned.

The only story to come close since then was an interview with the MBL product manager on Collective-Thoughts.com, a blog where I am also the author.

That story had some great insight into the future of MyBlogLog, and for some reason, as commented by Digg user BartTheBear

Apparently not in Digg. It got buried in 2 hours flat.
What the heck happened?

Maybe there is some kind of keyword blocking on the term “MyBlogLog” – there is certainly lots of spam on Digg with stories using the word, from blogs that for some stupid reason submit every one of their articles to Digg – probably just for backlinks.

It is also possible that some people monitor specific terms to bury articles about specific topics, or specific sites. That would probably then class as abuse and would be something for Digg management to look into.

I delved back through every story submitted about MyBlogLog in the last year.

Digg Please Ban My Site

If you have decided my blog isn’t suitable for whatever reason for a Digg audience, please just ban me totally – honestly it is misleading your users if they think they can vote for a story because they honestly think it is newsworthy, and for some algorithm or black flag to automatically determine the news isn’t news because it is from my domain.

Unlike most, I have come to realise I don’t mind being black flagged, but if I am in some way black flagged, make it real – tell people that content from my site isn’t worthy of a Digg audience.

Hidden Penalties Are Deceptive

As previously stated, I am writing this on behalf of the sites I write about and my users. I grew to 3000+ subscribers for this blog without any articles reaching the Digg front page, and without gaming social media.
It would be nice for the sites I write about to gain some additional exposure when they have something newsworthy to write about, but above all I am sick of people voting for my content knowing the votes are worthless.

Update

I made a rare exception and submitted this article myself to Digg as I thought that would be the best way to “reach out” about this situation. I didn’t think it was appropriate for someone else to submit it on my behalf.

Update 2

Buried

I wonder if anyone on the Digg staff even read the article?

This article does not reference Google Toolbar PageRank in any way

First of all you are going to need to do a little homework.

Eric Enge interview with Matt Cutts

The Eric Enge interview with Matt Cutts was truly exceptional and revealed a number of gotchas that for some reason continue to be circulated.

Key takeaways

Matt Cutts: … Now, robots.txt says you are not allowed to crawl a page, and Google therefore does not crawl pages that are forbidden in robots.txt. However, they can accrue PageRank, and they can be returned in our search results.

Matt Cutts: … So, with robots.txt for good reasons we’ve shown the reference even if we can’t crawl it, whereas if we crawl a page and find a Meta tag that says NoIndex, we won’t even return that page. For better or for worse that’s the decision that we’ve made. I believe Yahoo and Microsoft might handle NoIndex slightly differently which is little unfortunate, but everybody gets to choose how they want to handle different tags.

Eric Enge: Can a NoIndex page accumulate PageRank?

Matt Cutts: A NoIndex page can accumulate PageRank, because the links are still followed outwards from a NoIndex page.

Eric Enge: So, it can accumulate and pass PageRank.

Matt Cutts: Right, and it will still accumulate PageRank, but it won’t be showing in our Index. So, I wouldn’t make a NoIndex page that itself is a dead end. You can make a NoIndex page that has links to lots of other pages.

For example you might want to have a master Sitemap page and for whatever reason NoIndex that, but then have links to all your sub Sitemaps.

I have just provided a couple of highlights, I am not attempting to replace a need for visiting the site I am citing. This is something I hate seeing, when people take other people’s content and repurpose it, thus making the original article worthless.
There are a few other gotchas in there, I suggest you read it 2 or 3 times to really understand what was said, and what wasn’t said.

Dangling Pages

One of the best descriptions of dangling pages is on the Webworkshop site, though they are assuming that links are totally taken out of the equation based on what they quote from the PageRank paper.

“Dangling links are simply links that point to any page with no outgoing links. They affect the model because it is not clear where their weight should be distributed, and there are a large number of them. Often these dangling links are simply pages that we have not downloaded yet……….Because dangling links do not affect the ranking of any other page directly, we simply remove them from the system until all the PageRanks are calculated. After all the PageRanks are calculated they can be added back in without affecting things significantly.” – extract from the original PageRank paper by Google’s founders, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page.

Alternate interpretation

This is just an aside, as the amount of juice lost to dangling pages currently is hard to determine, and could be handled differently

They are assuming that if page A links to 6 other pages, 5 of them being dangling links, then the website will be treated as only having 2 pages until the end of the calculation.

Whilst I haven’t delved into the maths (and probably couldn’t through lack of information and lack of knowledge), it also seems to me that at the time the pages are taken out of the cyclic calculation, a percentage of the link value can still be taken with them.

Thus though the site for cyclic calculations will be just 2 pages, the link from A to B might only transfer 1/6 of the juice on each cycle.

At the time the original paper was written, Google only had a small proportion of the web indexed due to hardware and operating system restraints.
In modern times they have a lot more indexed, thus a more complex way of handling dangling pages could be possible.

More food for thought, a link to a page that is considered supplemental could be treated as a full link or as a link to a dangling page, or some other variant.

Even more food for thought, a site with multiple interlinked pages with no external links at all could be looked on as a “dangling site”.

Ultimately what is important is that dangling pages are a juice leak, though it is difficult to determine exactly how much

Additional Research On Link Juice Flow

I have referenced these works before, and I am just going to keep on referring people to them.

• SEOFastStart by Dan Thies – a good introduction to SEO, and also introduces the ideas of controlling juice around a website – no email signup required
• Revenge of the Mininet by Michael Campbell – a timeless classic as long as PageRank continues to be important – the download page isn’t hidden if you really don’t want to sign up to Michael’s mailing list, but I have been on his list for years.
• Dynamic Linking by Leslie Rhode – A bonus that comes with Revenge of the Mininet

I mentioned these is a comment on SEOmoz recently in a discussion on PageRank, and for some reason my comment received just 2 up votes and one down vote.

I don’t gain in any material way from promoting these free ebooks, though I might gain some goodwill. The main reason I link to them is because they are a superb resource, and it saves me countless hours writing beginners material.

OK, On to some debunking

Blocking Pages With Robots.txt Creates Dangling Pages On The First Tier

In the quoted paragraph above, Matt clearly states that pages blocked with Robots.txt still accumulate juice from the links they receive.

Those pages don’t have any external 2nd tier links that are visible to a ‘bot, thus they are dangling pages.

How much juice they leak depends on how Google currently factor in dangling pages, but Matt himself suggests not to create dangling pages.

If you read any SEO Guide that suggests that the ultimate cure for duplicate content is to block it with robots.txt, I suggest you might want to question the author about dangling pages.

Meta NoIndex Follow Duplicate Content

This is a better solution than using Robots.txt, because it doesn’t create dangling pages. Links on a duplicate content page are still followed, however both internal and external links are followed and thus are leaks, often multiple leaks for the same piece of content when using CMS systems such as WordPress which create site-wide links in the sidebar when using poorly designed themes, plugins, and especially WordPress Widgets.

If you read an article suggesting using Meta Noindex Follow, ask the author how they are controlling external links on duplicate content pages.

Meta NoIndex Nofollow Duplicate Content

If you use Meta Noindex Nofollow, whilst this is handled slightly differently by Google to Robots.txt, as the page won’t appear in search results, it is still a page accumulating Google Juice if you link to it, another dangling page or node.
Second tier leaks from the page won’t leak, but the page as a whole will leak depending on how Google are currently handling dangling pages.

I don’t see people recommending this frequently, but as with Robots.txt, ask the author about dangling pages.

Dynamic Linking & rel=”nofollow”

Extensive use of Nofollow and other forms of dynamic linking are the only way to effectively prevent duplicate content pages in some way having a effect on your internal linking structure and juice flow. The Wikipedia page on Nofollow really isn’t correct.

The Dangling Sales Page

To finish I want to give you an example of how a sales page that previously might have benefited from lots of links can easily be turned into a dangling page and effectively discounted from cyclic PageRank calculations.

Sales pages started off just as a single page with no links:-

Despite all the links coming to the site from external sources, this website is a dangling page, thus excluded from iterative PageRank calculations. It might still benefit from anchor text and other factors, but it effectively is not part of Google’s global mesh and passes on no influence.

Add Legal Paperwork And Reciprocal Links Directory:-

A much more structured site, and whilst it gains some benefit from reciprocating links there are 2 factors that are almost universally overlooked.

1. No Longer A Dangling Page – because the site now has external links, it is valid as part of the global ranking calculations. Other pages as mentioned above were previously stating that the amount of juice passed to dangling pages was minimal, so this could be potentially a huge boost.
2. More Pages Indexed – it is only a few pages, but with PageRank it is often not just how much juice you have flowing into a site, but what you do with it.

The reciprocal low quality links might not have had a huge amount of value compared to the benefit of being a member of the “iteration club” and having a few more pages indexed.

Add a link to the designer

Some early single page sales letters were not dangling pages, but didn’t benefit from any internal iterations, and acted as a conduit of juice to their web design firm.

The Danger of Using Nofollow or Robots.txt on Unimportant Pages

I have actually seen this on a few sites:-

• Reciprocal Link Directory Removed
• Link to web designer removed
• Nofollow added to legal papers that are looked on as being unimportant

Such a website is now out of the iteration club, it is a dangling page as it is no longer voting on other pages.

My Own Gotcha

I mentioned that this catches me out as well.

A while ago I wrote an article about linking to Technorati being a problem. It might still be true, but the amount of juice lost through such links might also be lower than I thought, due to Technorati using meta nofollow on every page. Technorati tag pages are themselves dangling pages with no external links.

Wikipedia and Digg on the other hand are not dangling pages. They still have external links to other sites, and thus any links to them are part of iterative calculations.

I would still say it is best to have tags pointing to your own domain tag pages, and to use nofollow on links to Wikipedia and Digg, though with Digg I suggest that is only on links to submission pages which contain no content.

Stumbleupon is also tricky – there are no external links from individual pages, but there is extensive internal linking.

With Digg and Stumbleupon, profiles rank extremely well, so you can use them for reputation management even if you get no juice direct from the profile.

I think I was the first to describe Wikipedia as a black hole of link equity, explained why you should nofollow Wikipedia extensively, and was one of the first to promote Ken’s Nofollow Wikipedia plugin.

You would have thought in 10 months they would have come up with an alternative to using nofollow on all those out-bound links.

They do however link out to a few trusted sites without nofollow, from just a few pages. I suppose Google does still allow them to be part of their iterative calculations.

Another Own Gotcha

This isn’t 100% something I can fix. I have suggested people use robots.txt on certain sites knowing it wasn’t the perfect solution.

You might notice on this site I don’t use an extensive robots.txt, and the design of my site structure is deliberate, but then at the same time I use nofollow with lots of custom theme modifications, and should use it a lot more.

Eventually I will come up with solutions to make things a little easier.

Tools In The Wrong Hands Can Be Dangerous

Using Robots.txt and Meta Noindex, Follow as a cure for duplicate content is a SEO bodge job or SEO bandaid. It may offer some benefits depending on how dangling pages are being handled, but is certainly not an ideal solution due to the amount of leaks that typically remain or dangling pages that are created.

I am sure a lot of people have actually read the story by now because Darren linked through and Jordan remixed the statistics a little.

What struck me the most was that 29% have never been on the front page of Digg.

8 Blogs in the Technorati Top 100 are none English, and some of those as you would expect make up the largest percentage of blog that haven’t made the front page, but there are still 17% English blog that haven’t made it.

I would love to know which blogs have never made a front page that are in that Top100, as they deserve some Diggs.

Secondly of course it does need to be mentioned that there are 10s, possibly hundreds of quality blogs that for one reason or another have been barred from reaching the Technorati Top100 list.

A month or so ago I wrote about how to prevent being banned by Technorati and still retain most or all of the link juice you might get from various forms of viral marketing.

If you feel you have a chance of being in the Top100 in 6 months or a year’s time, I feel it is not worth throwing it away, although of course there are other gambits such as switching to a new domain name once you have built us a following, as it will most likely only take a few months to regain those links (it didn’t take long for Robert Scoble)

Here is the full “SEO Podcast” show which I also posted and discussed one month ago.
You can skip watching the whole thing, I have included an excerpt further down the page

However I want to concentrate on one small part of that discussion and unfortunately even when you have the whole podcast cached in the Podtech player, it doesn’t seem possible, at least on my system, to fast forward to the section I want to concentrate on.
So using their video player I wouldn’t be able to tell you to skip to a particular segment.

Podtech list all kinds of usage restrictions

I am including an excerpt for the following reasons

• The technical ability not to be able to skip to the part of the show I need to reference
• I need to use a small fragment of the whole in what could be looked on as a journalistic capacity, but I am not a journalist
• The section of the conversation I want to use includes what I personally said, and Jason’s response directly to me.
• What was said is an integral part of my ability to report on current events

So here is an excerpt along with some interesting clips

This signals a change in focus by Mahalo, possibly prompted by one of the key issues I had with Mahalo, that the content wasn’t Diggable.

Jason certainly seems to have taken that concept to heart, and is now competing against the sites he is listing as “quality search results”.

Mahalo was meant to be a “search engine” – Google is a search engine, they don’t create content – Mahalo is no longer just a search engine

Mahalo is now competing against content sites such as Lifehacker, Lifehack and Smashing Magazine who frequently publish links to great content, and “How To” information.

My suggestion was to make Mahalo search results “diggable” – that doesn’t require content creation, just a short paragraph explaining why a particular link is worthy of a reader’s attention.

Mahalo has gone beyond that.. I am not sure that is the purpose of Mahalo, at least how it has been spun to us to date.

Should I be given any credit? Jason has done the “made for digg” content sites to death with Weblogs Inc, but he might not have realised that Mahalo needed something of the same to gain links.
If he did realise it, then in the podcast he wasn’t telling the whole truth about his future plans to publish diggbait.

I thought it was strange that the story hadn’t been submitted to Digg, because it was already appearing on Megite.

Here is the story I submitted on Digg linking through to the original article on Reuters.

However if you do a search on Digg, the article just doesn’t exist…

I am not talking buried, it is as if the article has entered some kind of black hole of censorship.

Here is a search, and it includes buried stories.

The 3 most current search results are about autos.aol.com that are 3 days old.

I know there is a little bad air about Digg/Netscape, but censoring every single story regarding AOL just isn’t fair game.

The Reuters news story is being syndicated far and wide, but the Digg story is linking to the original breaking news.

If Digg wishes to maintain relevance, and its insistance that it is the users who are filtering content, and not the owners, they need to have a lot more clarity about these stories that seem to disappear from the Digg system.

As for AOL News, I think it is a major step forward. I have a 7Mbps connection although it is via an international connection – the page loads much faster than news.yahoo.com and actually faster than my blog homepage (oops)

The code is quite clean and light, and there are interesting pictures throughout the page, not just in the top 3 stories.

One of the biggest takeaways from Traffic Stampede Secrets that I reviewed a few months ago was how important it was to target the right social bookmarking and networking sites for your own sites, and also to evaluate and test how effective a particular bookmarking button might be.

I have just removed my StumbleUpon graphic that floats on the top right of every post, and the Technorati favorites button that was included in the same place.

StumbleUpon

I love StumbleUpon, I use it daily to find great sites, and my readers love it as well.

So why did I remove it?

I use a lot of tracking, and frequently I saw clicks of the StumbleUpon button, but no corresponding reviews.
Someone will click the button, and decide not to write a review, and then click their stumble button to go somewhere else. People are shy….

In that situation you don’t get a vote even if one was intended!

If someone is using StumbleUpon, they have the toolbar installed. The “Thumbs Up” button is right next to the Stumble Button.

It is possible I will get a few less reviews, but hopefully I will also get a few more positive votes for my content – those people who clicked a graphic and were too shy to write a review.

Thus whilst StumbleUpon traffic is great, the button I was using, because it only links through to a review form, might not have been helping me, in fact it might have been a negative for gaining votes, reducing the amount your best content is shared with others.

Digg

None of my content is written specific to a Digg audience. I try to write good “in-depth” content and generally many of my articles are not appropriate for the mainstream Digg audience.

Those articles that are appropriate appear to hit a well known phenomena, as happened on my article on Digg friends (which wasn’t about gaming Digg) or my in-depth review of PayPerPost Direct.

My recent articles on WordPress SEO, contain far more valuable information than the majority of “SEO Tips” articles that seem to make the front page of Digg.
Digg users often have short attention spans, and seem to prefer Digging shorter articles – I am sorry but I am not going to write short articles just for traffic. If an article needs more words, I am going to use them.

I am going to continue including the Digg button, because eventually I believe some of my content might become more appreciated by a wider Digg audience.

Technorati Favorites

The button was duplicating something I already include in my sidebar. I will still be reciprocating, many people find it valuable and it is my way of adding people to various OPML tools I am playing with.
There wasn’t a need to have the button in quite such a prominent position.

I maintain my Technorati Favorites with EngTech’s Technorati Favorites tool, the version from 23/05/2007 is working currently (see comments) – remember to clean up your favorites.

An example of how I use the OPML from my Technorati Favorites is the meme I created on Megite for the Technorati Favetrain.

The only way to be added to this special meme is to add me to your Technorati Favorites, and I reciprocate automatically.

This is how I get to read so many blogs, and seem to appear on blogs all over the blogosphere that have interesting articles.

PlugIM – New Addition

I have been a member of PlugIM for quite a while, and have always found it to be a good source of quality articles focused primarily on internet marketing.

Whilst many people might look on this as some kind of duplication with Bumpzee and the affiliate marketing community there, there is actually only a partial overlap in readership, especially among the dedicated reader base.

PlugIM is very much a niche community, whereas Bumpzee caters for many different communities, one widget fits all.
There are currently hundreds of niche communities which utilise some form of voting script.

Many might look on them as being Digg clones.

If you are a Digg user, let’s be totally honest – do you want the hottest knitting pattern for this coming season (yeah knitters will be thinking about Winter clothing already) appearing on the front page of Digg?

Until Digg caters for all topic areas, there is room for clones. Knitting is probably a bigger niche than Tech industry news.

Now for me, PlugIM is appropriate for my niche, I think it deserves a spot in prime real estate.

I have been waiting a little while to mention Michelle’s PlugIM plugin

When it was first launched it didn’t have the flexibility I needed to position it in the “prime real estate” that I wanted, but it is there now.

It is also very “light” in coding, just 4kb, and I hope it doesn’t affect load time too heavily. It certainly won’t be a factor on single pages. My front page is probably going to change somewhat as I make a lot of SEO changes.

One great advantage of the PlugIM plugin is that once an article is already submitted (which happens automatically because they pick up your RSS feed), you don’t have to be logged into PlugIM to vote, or even be a member.

I am also a marketer – PlugIM is designed for marketers and isn’t selfish – when someone votes on your content, it doesn’t take them away from your website.

Bumpzee

Bumpzee stays

I get a huge amount of traffic from Bumpzee on a daily basis, many of my readers are active users, and I maintain one of the largest communities on Bumpzee for blogs that have removed nofollow from their comments area.

In many ways Bumpzee is more like a social network than a social news or bookmarking site.

Bumpzee is the most multi-purpose voting widget, because the service caters for any niche.

Del.icio.us

I am going to integrate something for Del.icio.us with my next major overhall. I find myself using it more frequently for content I really want to keep a bookmark of for future reference.
It is most likely going to be using Feedburner’s Feedflares.

Netscape

I know a few readers use Netscape, though I have seen only limited usage of it where it has been provided in Feeds for the last 6 months.

Someone browsing your site from Netscape might be doing it with a sidebar with a voting button, so in many ways providing a button is superfluous.

Other Services

I am always on the lookout for services that would be useful to add, which my readers would actually find useful. I can provide lots of different buttons using the hacked version of Sociable I use, if readers are going to use them.

If there is a social bookmark service that you actually use on a regular basis, and would like me to add, please let me know.

Facebook? Well I have included it in my feed for a long time, it doesn’t seem to be used

Other Optimization

I am going to start adding some additional optimization, such as custom greetings for each source of traffic.

• People have heard about it
• A few people may even be using it
• It received and will continue to receive lots of links

Hmm damn… you mean links have value?

Guy has done a great breakdown of the cost of creating Truemors.

He might have spent too little or too much – I think he should have used better hosting from day one, and implemented a lot more functionality that is easy to achieve on WordPress, such as tagging with Ultimate Tag Warrior.

$12,107.09 was the total cost, which included $4,500 for the software, and $4,824.14 in legal fees. He also registered a load of domains, and whilst he thinks he made a mistake by not buying them from Godaddy and saving a few bucks, I would certainly recommend never buying a domain from GoDaddy – I prefer Namecheap.com and I know my expert friend Dave Zan has a few other recommendations.

Here is the slideshow Guy had made

The money spent on the legal paperwork and domains was good money spent, and also shows Guy’s commitment for the long haul.

Guy has no advertising, so how has he made a profit?

Links Have Value

Those links are not spam, it is all editorial links from top bloggers.

Truemors is probably already a PR6 maybe a PR7 domain, and people are not going to stop writing about them.

PR6 or PR7 with only 3000 links being reported?

Yes, quality links do that to blogs, just take a look at Vanessa’s blog.

Actually Vanessa has a few more links now than she did at the last pagerank update, but still in the 3000s.

Editorial links from influential blogs makes for very high credibility in the search engines.

Truemors Is A Real Blog

Unlike bookmarking communities, Truemors is currently being looked on as a real blog

It is hard to say whether Truemors is UGC (User Generated Content) or USC (User Submitted Content)

For now at least Truemors has a level of moderation by an editor, so it might continue to be treated as a blog.

Domain Valuation

Potentially a PR7 site at the next update, though it doesn’t have much age yet. Loads of credible links, I think the site has probably a fair amount of trust.

Guy isn’t renowned for great monetization, but the domain alone is probably worth $15-$20k even if it only has a trickle of new links coming in. I have a feeling links will just keep flowing.

Truemors Version 2

There are also some interesting things Guy could do with this model, at very little extra expense, such as build version 2 using WordPress Multiuser.

• Imagine every user had their own Tuemors that they could publish to, and that other people could subscribe to. That sounds a little like Twitter or Tumblr.
• Imagine you would have the option to republish the item on your own blog if you thought it was interesting – that would be a good alternative to voting for a story.
• The most republished stories could be promoted on the front page.
• The news item wouldn’t be resent to those who had already heard about it from another friend – no duplication

To create that version 2 of the site would probably cost him less than the original investment

It is true that what he has built can be easily replicated. When the site was first announced I looked at it, worked out all the plugins he was using, and was going to pay someone to create a “Truemors” like theme for WordPress.

Yep linkbait…. “How To Create Your Own Truemors Site in 10 minutes”

5 minute install for WordPress, and 5 minutes to upload and activate plugins and theme

I suggest people look at the Truemors site a little more carefully, and think creatively because it has a lot of potential, both for Guy, and for creative thinkers who might not realise quite how flexible WordPress can be.

I do wish he would remove the NoFollow from the links
That actually might eventually be the the deciding factor between Truemors being editorial content and user generated. Are the users the scum of the earth, or treated with some respect for the content they supply. Give links, and people will use the site more. Maybe just give links to registered users who post content and have validated via Paypal.

I don’t think the site is quite ready for a $1M buyout but that domain is already worth more than the money Guy has spent.
Would a VC invest in such an idea? Who knows, I suppose it all depends on future plans.

It has certainly got me thinking… I wonder if Guy realises how successful his site really is and its full potential

Update:- I Submitted this story to Truemors, if you enjoyed it, please think about voting for it on Truemors (no need to register)

I should also note that Truemors sends pings for any submitted story, so they really should have followable links. I wonder if this ping to Truemors will somehow register on Truemors.

Update2: Trackbacks Work

How many social news sites allow you to send them a trackback?

Remove the nofollows Guy!