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Digg, Netscape, And Organic Search Results 
By: Pat McCarthy 2006-11-06 Publishers and bloggers who have had the experience of having their content "Dugg", "Scaped", or featured prominently on any other social news or bookmarking sites have seen the short traffic spikes that tend to occur from this experience.
Links: Dugg, Scaped, social news, bookmarking sites  Many have commented that beyond those huge traffic spikes there isn't much long term value from having your content featured, and why submit to them at all if your content isn't going to make the front page when the traffic spike occurs? A recent experience with organic search results and some research has caused me to believe that the long term value proposition is changing and will get even better. It also sheds some light on which social sites may grow in traffic, and which of the three major search engines indexes them the best. The Initial Query My parents have an ecommerce site primarily selling an ergonomic stool called the Swopper Chair. I provide some technical consulting for them and I needed to look up some PHP shopping carts. So I did a Google search for "best php shopping cart". I started reading through the results, and noticed the result from Digg half way down. Knowing what Digg is, I figured it'd be a good recommendation and probably have some comments and additional links that might help me out. I read through the comments and ended up clicking through to both the Dugg URL and some of the URLs in the comments. This made me wonder if there is potential for organic search results for social news and bookmarking sites to drive long tail traffic to your site, maybe even if your article never got many votes and never made the front page of the site. The Tests It was time to start picking some search queries and see what kind of results appear from social sites and what about those sites makes that happen. I'll link to the query along with what social sites have results and where the original article ends up in the results. Test 1: john battelle keynote This was a search term from the post I made from John Battelle's keynote at the Blog Business Summit last week that did not get many votes on the social sites, and got a few links to my post from the blogosphere. Google:
Yahoo Search: No results from the social sites. Either Yahoo doesn't index them well, or index them quick enough. MSN Live Search:
Summary: Google provided the best and the most beneficial results for using social news to get higher rankings for an article than I could get on my own without submitting it. Test 2: yahoo invests This term is from the title of a more popular article than our first test. This one is from SmartMoney.com to the tune of 137 Diggs that was on the Business and Finance front section on Digg, and I also made a blog post with the same phrase in the title. Google:
Yahoo Search:
MSN Live Search:
Summary: Google's results make Digg and Searchmob look especially important to get higher rankings. It doesn't look like social sites matter to Yahoo, and MSN results are mixed. Test 3: toyota logo A few weeks ago my friend Mike Rundle had a little run in with Toyota based on a company working for them taking the 9rules leaf logo and barely changing it for a site they were running. I figured this search query might be a bit harder to rank high on, so it'd be interesting to see if the social networks helped out. Google:
Yahoo Search: No results Ugh, Yahoo hates social sites and blogs! MSN Live Search:
Summary of Tests Even though it was a pretty quick test, and the search terms I tested aren't that competitive, it's clear that submitting your site to the social news services can help drive more traffic to your site through organic search. I think we can also see that Google seems to embrace fresh content and the social news sites more than Yahoo and MSN, and Yahoo definitely isn't a big fan. This is probably not a big deal as most publishers are primarily concerned with Google traffic anyway. What does this tell us about the social sites? Digg and Netscape were definitely the most commonly found sites, and I ran some more additional quick tests and found that Netscape seems to also show up ahead of Digg in many cases. I had an extremely hard time finding Reddit or del.icio.us in any results. Why is this? Let's take a look at why each of these sites may or may not rank highly: Digg:
Based on looking at how they have set things up, Digg and Netscape are positioned the best to continue to grow from organic search results. This will be a key to break out of the tech audience and into the mainstream web userbase. If users find Digg through Google results they may be inclined to stick around. Also, as publishers learn about the value they can get from having their articles submitted to these sites, Digg and Netscape will get more submissions while other sites won't. It seems to me like Reddit and del.icio.us are missing the boat here and not doing some very easy things they could do in order to get their pages show up more in organic search. Do they not want traffic? Related Posts: Netscape "Scape This" Feedburner FeedFlare Results of being TechCrunch'd Will Digg Be Acquired? Digg vs. Slashdot Build Link Popularity In 7 Days Have a bookmark! - 
About the Author: Pat is the Director of Business Development at Right Media, the business unit owner for RMX Direct, and the author of the Conversion Rater blog. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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