How To Linkbait Digg

This is an excellent piece of linkbait that shows how to bait the most prominent social network, Digg.com. It is well known in the search engine optimization community that a piece of linkbait making the homepage of Digg can get 30,000 to 50,000 hits in 24 hours. This creates enormous incentive to submit spam quality top 10 lists to this social news voting website.

Because Digg users hate being owned by anyone, they have developed an acute dislike of SEO’s and will usually automatically bury any content submission if it appears to be commercial linkbait.

So how do you steal 150 million dollars from Terry Benedict’s impenetrable safe? Gangster style – become their friend, tell them what you are doing, then walk away with their loot.

Socialnewswatch has beat Digg at its own game by posting a masterful piece of linkbait that doesn’t attempt to hide the fact that they are gaming digg.

So, let’s experiment. The idea has been percolating for a while, but James Pegram’s Blog beat us to the punch. No worries.

Another thing they did was pit them against an archrival, Stumbleupon.com. No self respecting digger wants to be second string to any other social network, especially one owned by the ‘corporate establishment’ (ebay.com inc.)

On Digg, as stories move down the front page and on to the next, the traffic slows, like tall rollercoaster freefall that hits tremendous speeds, then gradually levels out and slows. Stumble is like a bumpy rollercoaster in the dark. You know the traffic will go up and down, you just don’t know when it’s going to go up, nor when it’s going to stop.

It’s well known that diggers hate advertising with a passion (almost as much as SEO’s) so to appease them:

A quick note about incentive: This blog makes next to nothing in ad revenue. That can be expected, as almost all of its traffic is generated by social media users who are normally too web-savvy to click on adsense or purchase from an advertising banner.

Finally, offer to show data and results. Digg users love code, statistics, numbers, facts (even those of dubious veracity) and the chance to be part of a widely used online survey proved irresistable.

All data will be posted here with times and results as they become available… Please Stumble/review it. Please help. Data is coming.

The result – this story was dugg like crazy, with almost 1000 votes as of this post.

Checkout the Socialnewswatch post to see this masterful linkbait in its full glory.