Wednesday 20 June 2007

Digg Blog Function, The Experiment

Digg Blog Function, The Experiment

Digg offers its users the possibility to directly post stories from Digg on you blog. Could this be a good way to get visitors to your blog? The Incredible Badger investigates.

Once again, I think this shouldn’t work, because the original website where the original story was written should be much, much more popular, because all the Digg links point to it, as well as many more from blogs and news sites (that is, for the very popular Digg stories).
Another problem with this could be that Google doesn’t lists the stories in its search engine, because the stories are copied from the Digg website, and thus do not count as original stories. Furthermore, many story outlines are probably too short to qualify for genuine blog posts for the search engines.

Whatever the case will be, I will run this experiment for a couple of days, posting popular Digg stories from the last 24 hours or 7 days. I look for attractive sounding titles that are somehow a bit unique (improving the chance of someone finding my blog post about it in the Google search engine). I will also write a comment for some of the stories, so I can see if this significantly improves the visitor rate the website attracts through Google.

I use Google Analytics to track the traffic to the website, so I can distinguish between visitors directed from other websites, and between all the different search keywords that people used in Google to find the blog posts taken from Digg.

It is also for this reason that you are free to visit the experiment blog to see how the different Digg posts look like (the ones I added my comments to can be recognized by the Italic texts under the Digg cotent).
Because I can see in Google Analytics that you were referred from The Incredible Badger, you will not jeopardize the outcome of the experiment. The Experiment Digg Blog site is called Trends For Now

In a week from now, I will write an update to let you know if using popular stories from Digg does have a traffic attracting effect.

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