Top 10 things you should know about the Digg Effect

Davak at Tech-Recipes has a great post about their experience on the actions of Digg users.

Many webmasters try to manipulate digg in order to gain traffic. Others fear that digg will eat up massive amounts of bandwidth and crash their servers. Having experienced both the slashdot effect (aka “being slashdotted”) and the digg effect, we wanted to share what we have learned from these experiences.

Let me list out the points that Davak makes, with a few comments:

1. Digg users do not click ads: The increased traffic that you get from Digg will only use up a lot of your bandwidth and will risk slowing down or crashing your server. The traffic from Digg will not help you to increase your income from ads as a lot of this traffic is just people surfing to see what’s popular in the internet world. Surfers are not looking for anything in particular and therefore, they are not going to be influenced by content-targetted ads on the site. So, stop Digging your own site for money.
2. Digg users do not use Alexa
3. Digg traffic does not generate new users, comments, or posts: Digg users often comment regarding a site on digg itself instead of on the dugg website. They just look around and leave.
4. Every site on the front page gets flamed in the comments
5. The digg effect brings in a moderate amount of traffic and uses a lot of bandwidth: I have got about 300-600 extra traffic when my site got dugg. Also about 400-700 MB of bandwidth gets used up.
6. Digg users are more polite than slashdot visitors: It seems that Slashdot visitors leave a lot of spam comments on a site while Digg users leave the site just as it were when they entered the page.
7. The digg effect is much less on a weekend: It is also true that dugg sites get lesser diggs on a weekend
8. The best digg post regarding a topic is not always the one that reaches the front page
9. Digg may or may not have positive effects on your Google Pagerank: Getting on the front page of Digg would seem that it would tell Google that your site is important which it does sometimes. However, often the digg link itself will appear higher in the Google rankings than the actual site to which the link points.
10. After a site is highlighted on the Digg front page, it will start showing up in the other social bookmarking systems soon: I have heard this before that sites that get listed on the front page of Digg also get listed on Del.icio.us popular page and other other social bookmarking sites after it is highlighted on Digg.

What do you have to say about this?

Check the orginal article here.