Digg Traffic - Useless Traffic

January 3rd, 2008

Would you like over 70,000 Digg users hitting your site at once? Maybe you will like over 1,00,000 users from Slashdot.

Everyone these days is trying to get traffic from these social media sites, the fever to get listed on these sites is gripping the Internet. On Digg for example people try to submit news stories as they happen and link them through their blogs, hoping to get to the front page. Most of the stories on Digg is made up of this kind of blog spam.

But the question is does it really work for the people who finally make it to the front page?

To answer this question we have to first ask ourselves what we wanted to achieve by being listed on these sites. If the reason was to get direct visitors then what we get in return are useless hits, people who just spend seconds on our site and then leave never to return. But if our goal was to get better search engine rankings then it may work in our favor.

If you are hoping that many of these people will click on the many ads that you are running on your site then do not bother. Traffic from social media sites like Digg and Slashdot is not organic traffic. So hoping that these people will click on ads or browse other pages on your site is wishful thinking. I will go further and say that if the traffic surge is the reason then it is not worth the effort when you factor in the bandwidth cost.

The analysis of the traffic is as follows:

Most of this traffic will

• simply go back

Very few

• will spend time on the page they visit
• will visit other pages on your site
• will sign-up to your newsletter
• will click on any ads
• will bookmark your site

So the only reason to get your site listed on these social media sites is to get good search ending rankings. Once your site is mentioned on these sites you will start getting new links to your sites as other people blog about your article/new story etc. These links will grow strongly in the first few days and will in turn increase your site rankings in search engines.

Entry Filed under: SEO