• 11
  • May


At what point does a site get too powerful?

I spent a good amount of time with Digg because it’s a great source for backlinks. Sure, I don’t make any money off this blog, but rather use it for experiments and giving back to the community. I occasionally post tutorials or reviews, building a small reader base and gaining decent weight in search engines, which becomes invaluable when I launch new products such as Desktop Nexus.

Most of my backlinks come from articles on Digg, but at what point does a supersite like Digg become too powerful? When does it gain wikipedia-like velocity, where no matter what happens, there’s no end in sight. I recently had an article hit homepage about Ubuntu Wallpapers, which received over 500 diggs. The problem, however, is after Google updated and reshuffled it’s results, the Digg article was crowned in the top space for ‘ubuntu wallpapers’ and number two (below) for ‘ubuntu wallpaper’, with my site below it at number five:

Digg Powerful

So Digg, receiving all it’s content from the community, has achieved such mass in search engines, that they themselves rank higher than the sites they promote. Should Google make adjustments to it’s algorithms, allowing less heavy sites to rank higher, based on the link structure? If a page has 50 backlinks, all pointing to it with no outgoing links from it (ie, no link exchanges), how can Google’s logic place one of the backlinks higher than the page being promoted? Common sense dictates that looking at a link structure such as that, Google should be able to decide which page is the source, and which are references.

However I’m tearing on Google mostly because they’re my main source of traffic, however Yahoo is even worse. Yahoo ranks both the Digg article and the DuggMirror on page one, but my site doesn’t come up at all in the first 10 pages. MSN, being clueless as usual, doesn’t rank the Digg article or my site at all.

Google is a great search engines, the best online today in my opinion, however I believe they’re over-tweaking their results. They’re degrading their overall quality by watering down the accuracy to help filter out spam.

Anyone else have any examples like this?

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24 Comments

  1. Coburn Says:

    Harry, try removing “Browse” from your Title Element, give G a couple of days and see if your page trumpes Digg.
    Also: digg have used the full phrase in their URL, whereas you’ve only used 1 word. Too late to do anything about the URL on this article, but next time you know what to do :-)

    Duggmirror: visit their site, send them a request to have your URL’s removed. Then add a line to your robots.txt file to tell duggmirror nott to touch any more of your domains - they do respect this.

    Drop me a mail to let me know you get on with this.

  2. Andy Beard Says:

    You linked to the Digg article with the keyword, thus you are making things worse for yourself

  3. sorabji Says:

    I noticed something similar with Flickr a few years ago. As it became more popular, virtually any image posted there turned up #1 in Google’s image and even web results. Many of the images were mis-tagged or randomly named and common sense said these were not the most relevant images for the search terms. It made little sense, since the individual Flickr users’ pages were not always getting much traffic, but Flickr at large was getting mad traffic, so Google assumed that virtually any image posted there was a winner. I do not see this happen so much any more, so maybe Google did tweak some things for supersites.

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  5. Matt Says:

    I think it’s better the way it is. Frankly I’d rather hit digg first. That’s kinda the point of digg to me is that you can see what people think of it before you even see it. I usually read at least the first few comments to see if the digg is bogus or not or wether it’s worth visiting the link. Then I return to digg if i feel like i have a comment.

    Here’s the perfect example; I just did a search for ‘Ubuntu Wallpapers’ looking for that digg link (i need a new wallpaper), but instead of finding said page with nice wallpapers, I’m commenting on your blog.

    Anyway, my 2cents … off to find a wallpaper.

    Cheers

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  7. fel3232 Says:

    digg is very powerful, but not for much longer. There are plenty of other Social Networks catching up…watch out.

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  14. run your car on water review Says:

    No doubt, digg is very powerfull but there are other social bookmarking sites like stumble upon,propeller and delicious, which are also very promising.
    But Digg admins are really very active as they keep on cleaning the site very frequently, i have never heard people saying that their account has been locked by propeller or stumble or even delicious but digg can ban your story as well as account if they find you in illegal diggs.

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