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WTF Dept. Why is Digg in Google search results?
This one comes from the WTF Dept.
Update: this article made the Digg home page, except not from here. Search Engine Journal posted a snippit of this article plus a snippit of a counter argument from William Burn. You can read the comments on Digg. For some reason, the Digg community found this article "lame" but on SE Journal (with no new content) found it Digg home page worthy :)
Update Jan 3: I just added a new article about whether commenting should take place on Digg or on the actual article. Read it here
I just do not understand why Digg shows up in searches on Google. Don’t get me wrong. I think Digg is a good service and provides many sites with a good bit of traffic. For example, TechCrunch reported that 80% of the traffic to the site comes from Digg. (reported by Arrington in September 2006)
So why does Digg have better search results than the sites themselves in some cases? Because Digg has a higher rank within the Google system. But if you look at Digg, from a true standpoint, what does it really offer? It offers a link to the actual story, a 1-2 line overview of the story and sometimes comments from Digg users.
My belief is that this is not enough to warrant a listing in Google. Since at its most basic sense Digg only offers a link to the actual story, then that story should occupy that position within Google, not the Digg link. I believe content publishers actually lose the chance to see that visitor because the person has to click twice and even understand that they must do that. And I am talking about mainstream non-diggers now, not the group who already understands what Digg is for.
Here are a couple of searches which produced Digg results:
In closing I would say that I like Digg a lot for many reasons and hope to create "Digg-worthy" content everyday. But by removing Digg results from Google, we can get people to what they are really after quicker, the actual content.
I am not sure if Digg have fixed it yet but there was a way of posting a link into comment which would also rank in a search. This is why you see some completely off topic links.
The problem with this is that digg is so linked via track backs and news site etc it has must have massive value under page rank.
I think Google should remove digg posts as duplicate content to be fair.
And I think you’re wrong here.
(damn, is there an echo in here?)
Digg is great to see in search results because you get a 3rd party verification of the content. You see comments that aren’t subject to the editorial review of a particular site. And in many cases because of how low-ranked most hidden jems are in Google, Digg acts like a gateway to the good stuff and filters out all the SEO-driven, Google tricking, low-lifes who want to mislead you with their rankings.
If anything should be removed, it’s those types of stupid sites in high rankings. If anything should be boosted, it should be Digg results.
It looks like your original digg story is seeing a bit of resurgence. I’m hopin it makes it to the front page.
Let me know what you think about my take on the issue.
Allen –
As I commented over at Loren’s, thanks for brining this question into the forefront of a lot of people’s minds. It was definitely something I had never thought of before.
I think one of the major issues with Digg is evident by the number of comments your original post here received (4) as opposed to Loren’s followup (38) and “Mu”’s which was quite a bit. Original content creators lose in the social network site game very often.
Anyways, you had me thinking all day about this and I’d like to know, just like the guy above me, what you think of my opinion – My Take.
Great article and I will be reading your site more often now as very few people spur this type of inspiration and thinking in me lately. Well done Allen.
- Hagrin
I agree. Returning Digg links before the actual articles they reference is simply dumb. Digg is just another type of search engine in many ways and returning Digg results on Google is like Yahoo returning Google results within their own search.
Digg might be a great gatekeeper for the information that is submitted to the site, but when I do a Google search I want a link to the most relevant, most authoritative source as possible. If folks want to contradict the original source they need to do so in their own blog or on their own site and not in the Digg comments. In this day and age of trackbacks and blog content spidering technology it’s fairly easy to figure out who is talking about any given article or post.