The Digg.com Algorithms?

Millions of companies spend millions of dollars to try and get a rough idea of the Google algorithms, but when was the last time you tried to discover those secret Digg.com algorithms?

Today I am going to share with you the factors that we believe may be used by Digg to decide which stories make the home page and which stories get burried.

Note: This information is not designed to be used to game the system, it is purely for information purposes.

Time taken to get votes

Votes are clearly the most important factor for Digg.com, but the time taken to get those Diggs is equally important. For example, 40 Diggs in the first 30 minutes will probably be enough to get you on the homepage. But 80 Diggs over 2 months will not.

Digg Users

With Digg.com it is probable that Digg looks closely at the quality of the voters and not just the quantity. It is likely that Digg looks at whether the voters have had successful stories in the past, have they submitted stories that have been burried in the past? how many friends do they have?, age of their memberships? (e.g if they have been an active user for 3 days then they will have less trust).

In many ways the above also applies for the submitter of the story. If your story is submitted by a known spammer, then you will struggle, but if your story is submitted by a top 100 user, then it will be a positive.

Your website history

Has your website been featured on Digg before? was it seen as spam/burried? did it feature on the main page? how many votes did the story get?

All of these factors probably are used to decide whether your story is worth featuring on the main page or not.

Suspicious Information

It is likely that Digg also uses rules for finding suspicious Diggs.

* Diggs from the same IP block
* The same people as last time (e.g if your friends Digg all of your stories)
* Diggs from new users

Amount of comments

I have heard many people claim that the amount of comments on a story is a factor. Personally I am not so sure about this, I have seen many stories on the homepage with zero comments.

If this is a factor then I would say that it is not a major factor.

Summary: I am always looking for new factors that may be used by Digg.com, the purpose of this article is NOT to spam Digg.com, it is to inform you on how Digg may think, and hopefully will prevent you from making any mistakes that will get you banned.