Savvy Affiliate

Digg - Bad For Your Site…… At Least Not Good For Your Site

A lot of webmasters put a lot of time and effort into being listed on some of the social networking sites such as Digg.  They think that these sites will be the magic bullet for their page.  If they get listed on Digg, they will get a lot of traffic for their site.  And lots of traffic means lots of money right?  If they get Digged, and get thousands of hits, then of course they will get lots of cash right?

Wrong.  Digg users are some of the most Tech savvy users on the internet.  They are linking through Digg in order to do one thing.  Read the page, and then bounce back to Digg.  They are not there to click on ads.   Additionally, many Digg users use the Firefox browser, which has a very popular and efficient plugin which stops ads from being displayed. Many webmasters who get Digged report seeing their click through rates plummet for that period of time while they are high on the Digg site.

In fact, Digg can even be bad for a site which is not prepared for it.  If you have a webpage which has not taken any measures to handle Digg, an influx of Diggers can quickly eat up your bandwidth for an entire month.  This leaves you with no options other than to leave your page down for the rest of the month, or to shell out additional cash out of pocket in order to increase your bandwidth.  

There are things you can do to make your site stand up to a social networking influx though.  Wordpress users can download the plugins Wp-Cache and Digg Defender, which will help a site stand up to all but the most ferocious spikes in traffic.

So that means Digg must only be bad for a site right?  Why does anybody bother Digging their page?

Well that’s not exactly true, see part 2 of this post to see why Digg is Good for your site