Sploggers and Marketers Targeting Digg

Posted on December 4, 2006

The bigger the social media websites or memediggers like Digg and Reddit get the more spam and cheat tools they attract. CNET reports how fake articles from splogs are being promoted on Digg to drive traffic to the splog.

Some marketers offer "content generation services," where they sell stories to Web sites for the sole purpose of getting them submitted to Digg and other sites. This combination of spam and blogs is called "splogs." The stories often feature topics and keywords in headlines that are likely to appeal to the Digg crowd, such as "geeks" and "Apple."
Lazier but still tricky marketers merely scrape content off legitimate sites to put up on their own sites in a technique called "link jacking." In essence, they are hijacking the links that should go back to the original site, experts say.

The CNET story also mentions several websites trying to create systems to cheat Digg. A website called User Submitter claims to pay people to promote stories on Digg. A website called Spike The Vote appears to be a system that lets members trade diggs. Then there is the Friendly Vote Group, which appears to be a site where people team up to promote each others stories. It is unclear how much influence these communities out to game Digg have.