Jeff Woelker : Chicago SEO, SEM, and Online Marketing Consultant

So I saw this video this morning from TechCrunch and it shows a new search interface that Google is testing out more widely. I remember hearing about this last year and thought, I’d rather not. Seeing it again still kind of leaves me with that opinion. Here are my hesitations:

1. User Interface - Please don’t do this to the current interface. It’s kind of ugly. The reason I go to Digg is because I expect this kind of nuttiness. I go to Google because I want information, not a bunch of buttons to push.
2. Politics - There is a lot of competition out there for top search results. I’m assuming that if this is fully rolled out that voting up and down will only be a marginal part of the search ranking, or if you vote up or down or add/remove results, that it will only effect your ranking views when you are logged into Google.

My gut tells me that this is just another product team project that won’t make it all the way to the homepage. Only time will tell though.

Update: I received an email from Dan Lewis, an employee of Wikia Search, and he said that Wikia Search has been doing a lot of this stuff for a while now. Check them out when you have a second.

I’m still kind of in shock from this news, but apparently, according to comScore numbers Yahoo! Buzz’s traffic numbers were higher than Digg’s for April. Seriously? Kind of hard for me to believe, but I guess unless we hear from Digg and Buzz as to their exact traffic numbers, it’s the best we have to go on.

I’ve been seeing more and more that marketers and regular users on Digg have been saying “it’s impossible to get on to the homepage of Digg” and that “digg is broken“. But this is really surprising news for such a young site. I’m thinking that the marketing team at Yahoo! Buzz should be given several gold stars for pulling off this feat. Either that, or marketers have discovered a way to exploit Buzz for everything it’s worth.

I haven’t checked it out yet, but I definitely will now. Does anyone have any experience with Buzz? Easier to use than Digg? Better information? What’s the reason for someone to jump from Digg to Buzz or vice versa?

So recently, I was inundated with the “Digg Effect“, which if you are unfamiliar is similar to the Slashdot Effect, in that your site goes through the following process:

1. Your site is discovered by someone.
2. They post it to either Digg or Slashdot.
3. Your site is flooded with traffic, which it either handles without a hiccup or crashes disastrously.

My site handled it fairly well in that it didn’t go down completely, but definitely choked at times. Below is a screenshot of the Digg post that made the site crash:

Click for full version
Click here for Digg Page

So what does the Digg Effect look like graphically?

As you can see, my traffic is not really on par normally with what Digg can drive to a website. I realized I had been “Dugg” when I walked away from my desk and half an hour later, my email box had “25 new comments” to be moderated for my blog. Normally, I get one or maybe two, but never 25, let alone 90. The range of comments also surprised me as the diverse nature of Digg’s audience.

So what can a marketer take away from this?

If you are going to give users the ability to “Digg” or post your content to a social networking site, make sure it’s the content you want them to post. In this case, I “dugg” my own article, which I always do as a good blogger. The result is exactly what I wanted out of Digg, which was to drive traffic and links to my site to inform users, get out my own opinions/brand, and maybe make a few dollars off Adsense. However, let’s think for a moment about the worst case scenario, which is often how a Digg thread starts:

I’m a disgruntled web developer at Company X. I post an internal memo online about a product release date that will be missed on Company X’s website. One of our users finds that memo and Digg’s it. Ten minutes later, I have half the users on Digg looking at this memo and our stock plunges 15%.

Don’t think it can happen? Look at Applegate. It’s because of Digg, blogs, and other social media that this “information” spread as fast as it did. So the bottom line for online marketers is that sometimes it’s an excellent idea of what tools to provide your users, but at the same time, make sure your information security is such that you can mitigate this kind of risk in case you do enjoy the “Digg Effect”.

To learn more about link baiting, social networking lead generation, or link building using Web 2.0, feel free to contact me anytime.

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