More aggressive SMO marketers often talk about being careful not to get user accounts banned on digg. But what about the domain name? Banning user accounts has to do with the actions of the user. That is, behaviors and actions the user can control.
However, a domain name brings into other considerations. For example, whether or not influential members of the digg community like or don’t like a certain site or topic, regardless of what the mass of digg users respond to in the form of story submissions and votes. The site or blog owner has little control over whether other people submit stories and/or vote on them, bury them or report them as spam. Even if they’re not.
Sites can be banned from having their stories submitted to digg based on the activities of others having nothing to do with the site owner.
I recently learned from a top digg member that certain digg community members decided to start getting rid of SEO sites by emailing spam complaints to digg. These community members’ definition of spam blogs is not what you might think. As long as the site has to do with SEO, they apparently consider it spam because the digg community generally detests anything to do with SEO.
“All the users decided to email digg on spam about the seo sites. It is their way of stopping them getting on digg even if they are not spamming. They also modified version 4 to stop spammers as well by removing the “befriend” feature on digg. Their version of spam is not splogs, but instead what the users don’t like (seo sites)”
This happened to Online Marketing Blog recently. No stories from our blog had ever been buried until last week. “5 Myths of SEO” and “Interview with Stacy Williams” were targeted. Does anyone reading this consider those stories misleading or spam?
The kicker is that we didn’t submit those stories. A few days later it was bye bye to our domain. To describe this as a rotten thing to do to a site is a gross understatement. I may be biased, but I would hardly consider Online Marketing Blog as spammy in any way. What do you think?
An email to digg support was returned with:
“When submitted stories are consistently reported as spam and users complain via our feedback email about submission spam, we ban the domain. The domain will not be unbanned. The domain would consistently get reported as spam otherwise.”
-The Digg Support Team.
I was at a loss until I put 2 and 2 together and suspected it was a concerted effort either by SEO-miffed digg users or competitors. The comments from the digg user above seemed to confirm this. Interestingly, a follow up email to digg support remains unanswered.
If you are keen on such activities, be sure to read Graywolf’s itemization of tactics on how to get a competitor’s site banned on digg with this post: “How to be a “Dirty Digger”. For me, it was a bit eye opening as to how easy it would be. Regardless, it’s a crappy thing to do.
(5 votes, average: 4.80 out of 5)
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About Lee Odden
Hey Michael, I think it’s fine that you blogged it because I agree – it’s a big flaw in the digg system. There’s no doubt it needs attention because if a “goody two shoes” site like mine can get hit, anyone can.
I knew they were out of control the day Sitepoint got banned.
Man that sucks about Digg. The reason I blogged about was to drag that flaw out in the open so it could generate some noise and pressure the folks at digg to re-evaluate their decision on banning of URL’s. Not sure the message is getting through though. Since the Digg guys are doing the search conference circuit might be worth trying get some face time with them to explain the situation in more detail.
Yeah – that really sucks Lee but this is happening more and more. It’s getting to the point where people are now submitting sites just to see if they are banned (like this: http://digg.com/tech_news/Testing_Digg_CensorShip). Does that make for a better user experience Digg???
I’m not at all surprised about this.
John Chow, earlier last month, discovered the hard way that “spam” is relative on Digg, and quite frankly, that Digg has an absolute lazy “web2.0” way of determining this.
Hope you don’t mind, but I chronicled the whole event over here –> http://www.deepjiveinterests.com/2006/11/26/john-chow-confirms-mobs-rule-at-digg/
They let their users determine it for them.
More than getting people to complain a site is “spam”, there is potential way to get it done automatically — and that is to submit a certain # of submissions for a URL, let’s say NYTimes.com, and then create sockpuppet accounts to bury them.
Bury enough of them, and it will trigger an automatic ban of a URL … and as you’ve already figured out, trying to unban is very difficult.
Because ‘banning’ and ‘spamming’ is entirely relative, and open up to extreme abuse to people with agendas, I would say its even more dangerous than “gaming” to the FP — as it looks like its a way for people to ‘censor’ certain sites they just don’t like.
But you’ve already talked bout that. 😉
Cheers,
t @ dji
That’s just wrong. You have a very useful blog here. Everything presented is either informative or helpful in some way and always very professional. There is no reason for it to banned from anywhere, especially since you do not have any control over potential troublemakers. The Digg community will suffer as a result if they can’t figure out how solve the problem.
That’s the problem with going mainstream. As Digg grows and expands, it can’t control itself. Like any business model, they need to re-evaluate how the system works and how to make it work on a large scale. This is only the beginning of the end if they don’t fix things. Spammers could easily go through and start marking stories as spam and get thousands of legit domains banned until Digg becomes useless.
Let get this straight…Digg permits anyone who has a vendetta or simply wants to blast their competition to hell, the right to blow them out of the pool? So if someone doesn’t like something I write, they can play judge and jury and take my site to the Digg Warlords and have it removed with no investigation, no notification, no opt to defend, no warning, and no back up data/proof/facts other than heresay? They have to be kidding! Am off to disable all my links to Digg and disabling my account. I hate spam but its usually pretty obvious who they are. Anyone with half a brain can tell the difference between true spam and a spoiled sport vote.
Hi Kim, your observation has pretty much been my experience. As much as I’ve written about my confidence in the social news community at being able to self police “real” spam, getting our domain name banned by digg is like standing up for a friend and then that friend stabs you in the back.
Apparently I’ve been a bit too optimistic. There are so many good things happening with digg, it’s a sad reminder that despite the pretty wrapper, some things are rotten inside.
I couldn’t be silent on this…sigh. I feel badly for you and others who experience this. I’d be the first in line to torch scum spammers but when the good guys get hit, I can’t sit still and be quiet about that. A check to try and get my account disabled turned up nothing. I couldn’t find a way. The Terms hint that you simply can’t. You just have to stop posting to it. The only action I saw I could take in a hurry (because I’m supposed to be working), was to remove my Digg This icons on my blog. I’m happy to support unbiased social web. And willing even. I’m sorry for your experience Lee, but you remain Tops with me 🙂
Kim, you are such a good person and I really appreciate your thoughts and actions on this. I’ve removed the digg badges from our site not so much to affect digg, but to avoid our readers from getting the “you cannot submit this story because the domain name has been banned” message.
The funny thing is that our social bookmark tool which includes a link to digg is in use by over 50,000 blogs. The amount of traffic/links that has created for digg’s benefit is not trivial.
Thank you for your kind words!
Since Digg is banning SEO sites, I created a new social news site for the SEO community.
http://www.seoyak.com
Great blog post. I linked to it, and think that there will be other options in 2007!
Rex
http://www.digghater.com/
Sounds like Digg has now gotten political. Guess that didn’t take long.
Am I the only one who thinks that Digg must be the place where all the DMOZ editors went? Aren’t power trips great? 😉
Why do you guys care? It is DIGG!
If you weren’t submitting your stories just to get the bump in page views, then why do you CARE if you can’t submit it to Digg?
Do you really think your still blogs are so informative that everyone should be reading them? No. You just want the page view increase that Digg gives. In other words, you WANT to use Digg for your own financial gain.
The very fact that you complain makes you hypocrites. And stupid quite frankly. If your juveilne diaries are not good enough to be financially sound WITHOUT spamming Digg, then you need to find a real job.
JK87, hiding anonymously speaks volumes about you but there is entertainment value in replying to your spew.
This blog will get it’s little 25-30k unique visitors with or without digg. That’s not the issue.
The issue for me is when people try to submit a story they want to share with the digg community and get an error message “This domain name is banned from submissions” it sends an inaccurate message.
My complaint is not about being off of digg, its about someone else making that decision arbitrarily and digg support acting very much like DMOZ. And we all know where DMOZ ended up.
Hey Jill, I think we’re thinking the same thing!
Hi Lee – Amy at Searchles – http://www.searchles.com
Unless your content makes it to the homepage at digg, it’s unlikely that it will be discovered because their search and social mechanisms are below par.
Searchles doesn’t ban domain names unless they are truly objectionable – i.e. porn. But our algorithms and platform are structured to reward users who are on the site to interact intelligently around content.
i.e. we had a guy yesterday posting links to ringtones like crazy but because he has not created a ringtone “group” and affiliated them with the group, (and no one else seems to be particularly interested in ringtones) his content is less likely to be discovered on the site or impact results at other search engines. On the other hand, users that affiliate their content with appropriate groups and tag it appropriately are finding that its easier to reach and collaborate with their target audience not only at Searchles but elsewhere. For example, a group I created on Identity Theft Legislation as a resource for a reporter friend who was writing an article on the subject is now the top result at google when you search for “identity theft legislation” and “bennett.”
You and your audience clearly want to have an intelligent conversation on SEO issues and track/access the best content on the subject. We have several groups at Searchles dedicated to Search and SEO issues (some better than others). We would welcome your participation in these groups and any feedback on how we can improve.
PS – sorry for the elevator pitch but I thought you might find it useful based on your objectives and complaint about digg. Happy holidays!
Hi Li, it may be that search marketers are paying closer attention. It is a social news site and if they choose to run it this way, that’s their perogative.
I do wonder a bit though, if it’s a symptom of growing pains or if they really think the current editorial and exclusion policy is the best way to go.
Thank you for your very kind comments on Search Engine Gurus!
Lee – I just don’t get what’s up with Kevin Rose’s and Digg’s policy on this. Isn’t it that obvious how open for abuse this is? Or is it that we as a community are the only ones seeing this?
How can anyone protect their reputable, newsworthy sites from having this happen to them. Its like a bunch of Digg Nazis or something “No Digg For You!” 🙁
What they did to TopRank is just wrong, wrong, wrong!
Let’s all submit digg.com to digg and bury it 🙂 I’m sure our collective effort will get the message through.
Pierre
Hey Lee,
I really don’t support that weird domain banning thing.
It sucks.
In fact it sucks just as the Adsense account banning policy of Google Adsense. They also kick small accounts with low volume while leaving some big spam scraper adsense sites operators in the program, just because they make enough of money…
Therefore I don’t agree that Digg will just suffer itself from it’s banning policy… it’s just the same simple minded evil 100% or not evil 100% ( do I hear black or white seo ) that Google propagates…
and obviously Google is doing good with that policy, altough I don’t think it’s right and hurts the wrong people – sometimes…
best regards & merry xmas
christoph
I’m sleepy, I’ll skip the HTML:
http://paulamooney.blogspot.com/2006/12/i-was-banned-from-diggcom.html
Bummer that happened to you!
I haven’t been going to digg much since my ip got banned 😛
I was one of the people who checked out spike the vote before it was sold to a friend of digg 🙂
LOL
G-Man
I believe if digg doesn’t fix these problems soon it’s going to lose more and more users. After reading a few similar blogs today, and seeing how many other fellow bloggers are beeing banned (probably as I write this comment), I have decided to stop using digg before it’s too late! I am sorry for what happened to your blog, Lee. But hay, digg does not define your work, nor who you are! And I still remain an admirer!
Hi Adam, thank you for your comment and yes, I did see the post in LED. I see that Wired Magazine has a prediction in that it’s over for digg in 2007. If their editorial and moderator process weeds out enough good content sources, that may very well happen. But not before the recent funding runs out. 🙂
Cheers!
Lee,
Just wanted you to know I posted about this today in the LED (issue #2317). Hey, if *this* blog can be banned, then any site any time can be banned by catering to the “wrong” demographic.
Lee,
As if you need them… 🙂
When I heard they banned you and SitePoint and not me, it’s clear that they have huge problems with their procedures and policies.
If it were me, I would first try to contact the management of Digg and explain to them what is happening. This would be as a courtesy and not because it’s really hurting your business. If this leads nowhere then I would issue a press release and tell the entire, documented story. Not because you need to, but because it would help all the small SEOs and anyone else targeted.
I don’t care about Digg one way or another, but I can’t just sit by when I hear about misuse of power or screwed up systems that hurt people.
I am willing to donate to this cause, just let me know. I just read about this issue in LED Digest (http://www.led-digest.com). I’m going to go see if I can find some contact information over at Digg… 🙂
Hi Chris, thanks for the nice comment. You are right, it doesn’t affect my business. The main thing that bugs me is when people submit stories from our blog and get the “this domain on the banned submissions list” error message.
I might email digg again, but right now my focus is on our clients, training our team and trying to keep things interesting on this blog.
Cheers! 🙂
Here’s a radical idea – stop promoting Digg!
I’ve read enough posts by now suggesting that Diggs policies are tough on SEOs (in particular) and other sites deemed unworthy by the Digg audience.
Can I suggest that all the SEOs talking about marketing on Digg should switch to talking about Reddit or Stumbleupon and create a bit of buzz for those communities? Sure, Digg may create a tsunami of traffic initially, but I’d sacrifice the Digg pack for a more mature audience any day.
That’s nothing against Kevin Rose and Digg – I think he’s achieved a phenomenal thing with Digg. But the Digg audience are sending out a clear message and maybe SEOs and pro-bloggers should take the hint.
Oh we’ve taken the hint alright Gerard. We don’t show any links to digg our stories and the super popular social bookmarks tool that over 40,000 blogs have used to date, no longer offers digg as one of it’s options.
The digg community is as fickle as they get and if that’s the kind of audience a marketer wants to reach, then I say go for it. Otherwise, there are plenty of other ways to attract high quality traffic and links with attractive effort to results ratios.
Has the domain recently been unbanned along with others recently? Just wondering since some other domains that were banned recently were unbanned. I have to wonder if Digg has reached the point that it will start to fall apart.
Opps should have read the comment above…sorry about that.
Lee,
If you’re interested, we’d love to add you to our growing list.
Rick
Grow that list !
I just tried to submit a toprankblog url and guess what, still banned. I’ve gotten banned as a user before and quite frankly the digg “support” team is anything but.
Hi, I’m an italian blogger, hosted by Netsons.
When I tried to submit an article for the first time, I got the “spam” error message.
Netsons is a free web hosting service, very popular in Italy. Like Altervista does, every user has an URL like username.netsons.org.
I’ve discovered that the WHOLE domain, including everyone’s account, is banned (not only mine). Digg spam policy really sucks… 🙁
(sorry for my bad English)
Don’t know if you are still interested in this issue. But I have long noticed the same problem and was recently banned by a frivolous complaints. However, this time it seems to be part of a much larger patters. A number of women who operate lesbian=oriented blogs have been likewise banned–and are determined to follow up with it–through publicity, the media, and possibly legal action.
To get a start looking at this please check out this post on my blog:
Thanks
~Becky
Lee,
What an unfortunate sequence of events!
I find your posts to be of value and educational and the apparent action reflects fear-based thinking.
I am going to elect and believe your blog will only get stronger with more followers because of this situation.
Today I just got banned from Digg. And when you mail them and ask what is wrong they act as if you are a criminal. My site is as legit as possible and i work my ass off to provide new content every day.
I used to like them but now I really really don’t.
Banned by Digg? just get an alternate domain ie the .com, .net, .org version and apache rewrite to the original. Digg only bans one domain, not all iterations.
I was told by another site to “Digg” as many stories as you can to get the word out and bring traffic to your site, I know the person who said this didn’t do it for spite but Digg didn’t even send a warning that we were in trouble of getting banned they just banned us. It’s just pathetic that after reading all this others problems that nothing can be done about those holier than thou jerks.
BTW, the traffic was incredible maybe that’s what someone didn’t like…
I have run the web site http://www.grand-illusions.com, which is about science and education toys, since 1996. Part of the site is a toy shop selling a small range of things that are hard to source elsewhere.
A few years ago, someone posted a piece to Digg which mentioned an item that we sell, called the Metal Pen. Maybe it was a quiet days for news (it was December 24th!) but it did get a lot of discussion, and we certainly saw an increase in traffic and sales. As I say, this post was nothing to do with me. To be brutally honest, I had not heard of them before this happened.
Remembering the good effect that other person’s post had for us, I thought I would try to post a story myself about a new item that we have just got, which I think is really amazing. However I discovered that the whole http://www.grand-illusions.com domain is banned. Initially it said that we hosted adult content (which is not true). Then the support people said that it was a spam issue.
All I can say is that, before this week, I have never posted anything to Digg. So this all seems to have come about due to the action of others.
Sorry for the long post.
Hendrik