My good buddies Neil Patel and Cameron Olthuis must be working overtime these days. They’ve just recently become “evangelists” for Text Link Ads, and are also doing a new show called “Rush Hour” on webmasterradio.fm - tune in for the first show which will be held weekly Wednesdays at 4:00 pm. I’m honored to say that I’ll also be their first guest on the show, if there’s anything social media related that you’d like to hear covered, feel free to post it here, and we’ll see about putting it on. My only worry for them is that they cover too much of the REALLY good stuff that is working well these days. These guys are sharp, and it should be a great show to listen to for all you webheads out there. Be sure to tune in!
How many AAA companies do you know of? AAA insurance did it most notably with insurance. Insurance is competitive. You need any angle you can get. I think the roots of search optimization can be traced to this. This is the mindset. This is the school of thought in action. Gaining an advantage in the alpha-sort (thanks to Michael for the the techie-marketing terminology) is one of a handful of ways that you can increase your advantage in the world of optimization. This is beyond SEO - this is a marquee example of the school of thought that sets good SEO’s above those who still work on meta tags and creating reciprocal links. This is the school of thought that gives creative thinkers an advantage in any marketplace that they dive into. If you can’t figure out what I’m talking about - keep writing those title tags and meta descriptions. If you can, keep it at the forefront of your thought process when implementing creative campaigns - just be sure to spread a little link love if you engage in a little "yellow page optimization". Despite the simplistic nature - it so often gets overlooked. Keep your eyes peeled. Opportunities abound (and that doesn’t mean you need to post ‘em to the world the second you find them either:) **Despite the fact that I like this simple technique - it might also be a good label for the really BASIC optimization that most folks think of when they hear SEO (metas, titles, kw copy, etc.) - It could also be the type of people you’d FIND if you looked in the yellow pages under “search engine optimization” (yellow page optimizers). Hopefully it’ll take on a bit of a double meaning for people that “get it” - kinda like “Forget about it!”
Despite being incredibly sick of always hearing about “the new google”, and not believing it can happen due to the extremely high barrier to entry, I think there *IS* still opportunity for someone to gain significant share of the stagnating search marketplace. The ONE major reason it could happen - is geek mindshare. That’s where search was won by G. I read Rand and Matt’s excellent piece of the digg algorithm, and it got me thinking about why I like the site so well. If the same processes, and level of expertise can migrate to other genres - they have a winner.
- 1. Simple, TRANSPARENT - yet effective algorithm
- 2. Kevin Rose an Owen Byrne won’t sell out to Google (well - for less than a billion)
- 3. They just need an index - Y and G have both taught us it’s about quality and not quantity
- 4. They have the mindshare from early adopters
- 5. Effective, scalable spam solutions (community moderation)
- 6. It’s not hard to add topical categories
- 7. About 10,000 beta users away from creating the best index ever.
- 8. Strong ontology + decentralized user based quality control + (even a decent) index of pages + advanced search tools = kick ass search engine.
- 9. Digg *is* webmaster central
- 10. Relevance *is* the goal - and not a conflicting interest.
14 Tips to Kevin and Owen to Make Digg Better (go get ‘em!)-
- 1. Develop a payment revenue share model for users
- 2. Weight users votes with topical expertise
- 3. DON’T Alienate your users - solicit feedback - and COMMUNICATE with top users - a forum (public or private) would probably be effective. RETAIN the goodwill you have - don’t abuse it
- 4. Attract more celebrities and mainstream mindshare
- 5. Build an index (even if it’s beta on a subdomain)
- 6. If you can’t build an index - rent (borrow) one and lay your algo on it until you can.
- 7. Get some funding and build the infrastructure (it’s still too damn slooooow)
- 8. Develop a better ad model to pay for those better beefier machines
- 9. Hire the equivalent of netscape anchors - but use a more creative pay model than starving wages for full time work.
- 10. Get Leo Laporte on board - that guy rocks.
- 11. Don’t be afraid of beta stuff on subdomains (look at Google!)
- 12. Get your blog off blogspot - and never do anything like that again unless it’s for reputation management or link pop
- 13. Hire Oilman and Greg for search advice
- 14. Improve your advanced search functionality
Anybody else got reasons Digg will or will not be the next 800lb. gorilla? Suggestions for improvement?
I’ve been playing with Digg quite a lot lately - it’s an interesting site with a very well defined user base (of alpha geeks). I decided to start taking notes on some of my favorite articles and information on Digg for your reading pleasure (and so you don’t have to search as much as I did). I think there are some great opportunities for reaching an impressive audience with digg. They’ve got some sharp folks behind the scenes - and are improving their algorithm at a rate much faster than we’ve seen search engines do in the past.
I think the area that has made digg so successful is what I would call “human editorial authority”. I doubt people will get away with abusive techniques due to the strong editorial power of holding people accountable for what they post with transparency. While most the search engines DO have human intervention - they haven’t accepted and embraced it. One of the beauties of digg is if there is CRAP in the index - you know exactly who to blame for it. Giving humans editorial authority will create alternate issues to most search engines (problems more similar to dmoz likely) - but overall it seems to have increased the relevance as well as even sometimes the speed of information. I’m personally fascinated with digg both from a personal and a marketing perspective.
Recent US data on Digg.com in regards to their potential acquisition talks:
-Digg.com’s US market share of visits increased 231% comparing the week ending October 21, 2006 versus the week ending October 22, 2005
-Digg.com US market share of visits increased 176% comparing September 2006 versus September 2005
-Digg.com is the third most visited website within the Hitwise US News and Media - IT category for the week ending October 21, 2006
-Digg.com is the ranked at 114 most visited website within the Hitwise US News and Media category for the week ending October 21, 2006
-Digg.com received 55% of its US traffic from Google for the week ending October 21, 2006
Digg Suggestions
Lascivious display of outbound linking:
- Digg TOS
- More from the digg blog
- Top Digg stories of 2005
- Beginner’s Guide to Digg - More digg goodness from Neil and Cameron.
Stats
Use and Abuse
- Digg reaches 500k users
- 5 reasons diggers matter
- Koolaid guy gaming Digg
- AOL busted for spamming digg
- Why it doesn’t pay to game Digg
Story Posting
- Tips from a Top 10 Digg user on how to get to the Frontpage
- How to get your non-tech site into Digg
- 10 steps to guarantee you make the digg frontpage
- Ultimate Digg Post
- Digg deception
- 8 ways to get your site into digg
- Why you’re not on the digg homepage
Community and social aspects
Digg Traffic
FAQ’s and Algo
Don’t Sell Diggers
Tools
More search engine marketing information about digg
Tests and reviews will be in 30 days 
I’ve been playing with digg quite a bit lately, and one of the big problems is duplicate story submissions - or power users walking over smaller users by resubmitting the same stories from different sources. In my opinion, it’s only right to give a digg to the person who originally submitted the story - assuming it is the same topic and a reasonable story (I didn’t digg the article that had “AMAZING STORY!!!” in the title today despite it having been submitted an hour earlier than the one I DID digg). So do digg a favor - if you submit a story and SEE those duplicates, don’t say “screw those guys” and submit anyhow. Give a good karmic digg, and keep hunting for another good story. Consider the time as well as the better title - if there’s 5 minutes difference, and the late guy has the better title - I vote that the better title wins. A good title (as all SEO’s know) goes a long ways, but time should generally be the main consideration.
A few digg related links:
Digg Etiquette - DigitalSoap
Social bookmarking etiquette
Digg at Encoclopedia Dramatica
