Yesterday, when I was doing some research on Digg, I spotted a page that I had seen before and wanted to check it out once more. This page in question managed to get to the front page about three months ago, but when I tried to visit it today through Digg, it wouldn’t load anymore. It was 301′ed.
After digging in a bit deeper, I noticed that this website made it to the front page five times. Four of these submitted pages disappeared and were replaced by a 301 to heavily optimized pages on the same domain. Three out of five pages were submitted by the same top Digg user, who had submitted the same pages to Reddit as well.
I used to have the opinion that you can either try to redirect as much link bait strength to your most important pages by designing your page optimally (or changing it later), or you can try to catch all strength by 301ing the link bait page to one of your important pages. This example completely changed my mind.
Using a 301 on a page that has been generating links in the past is -in my opinion- not the way to go (and can even be dangerous) because:
It’s not user friendly. Visitors that are looking for specific content and find something that doesn’t correlate with the link that directed them to your website, will be disappointed.
You’re deleting great pieces of content. Why would you remove stuff that made it to the front page of Digg, Reddit or any other social media website?
You prevent the page from attracting even more links in the future. Good content will remain to attract links in the future as well. Content that is 301′ed to a heavily optimized page probably won’t.
You get a wrong incoming anchor text/ page content relationship. Especially when your link bait page isn’t 100% related to the products you sell, your anchor text/ page content relationship will be completely off.
This can even backfire in terms of bad publicity (gaming the system). What if a few Diggers found out that your website is 301ing several posts that made it to “their” front page. Can you imagine what that might cause?
You might lose that top Digger. I don’t know how this website managed to let the same top Digger submit several of their posts, but if his Digg reputation is in danger, he probably will refrain himself from submitting more stories.
And the reasons mentioned above aren’t even all reasons. For example, imagine what Google would do if more and more people would use this strategy. Do you think they will remain to handle 301s exactly the same way they do today?
So what can you do to let as much link strength and link relevance flow to the most important pages on your website?
Use in-content links to other important pages on your website (or add these links after the first link bump is over)
Nofollow pages that aren’t that important, or remove some navigational links on your link bait page
Provide an RSS feed in your “link bait section”. People who liked your link bait might like (and link to) your future campaigns as well.
Of course, there are some exceptions (off-domain 301s, for example). In some cases it might be better to 301 a link bait page, but I don’t think this is the way to go in most cases. Especially in this case, where it were blog posts and an html page that got redirected, I believe that other solutions might have been better. I can imagine that you don’t share the same opinion (or perhaps you do), so my question is:
do you use 301 redirects on your link bait pages? Why, or why not?
Ok, this will be my final post about Digg for now, I promise. This blog is supposed to be about Link Building, but Digg managed to get me a littleupset during the past few days (hey, this works great, thanks for the tip, Muhammad )
What really got me frustrated during the past few days, is the fact that Digg doesn’t allow me to maintain friendships with people from across the ocean. I visit Digg on a daily basis and usually do this around the same time. One of the first things I do (right after scanning the front page for interesting stuff), is checking out what my friends submitted. But since since the redesign was launched a few days ago, the submission listed in the ’submitted by friends’ section is limited to three pages only. This means that it’s really hard for me to check out stuff submitted by a friend from, for example, the west coast of the US or Australia. I can only view stories that have been submitted somewhere between 5 and 8 hours ago, which blocks out a reasonably big part of the world for me.
The listings in my “submitted by friends” section are usually submitted by people from (roughly) the same time zone as where I live in. Trying to get a Digg friendship with someone from across the ocean is quite difficult. Not very social, huh Digg?
BTW, from now on, all links on Wiep.net will open in the same window in stead of opening in a new window. After I noticed that I had over 10 different open windows earlier today, I thought this might be a bit more user friendly.
It’s obvious that not everybody is equally happy about the recent changes at Digg. While Technorati shows an increase in blog posts about Digg, it’s weird to see that only one negative post made it to the front page. And it wasn’t even a really negative post.
So what happened to all those other Digg criticizing posts, because I can’t imagine that this was the only one. Well, they got buried. Apparently, The Digg Police only wants positiveposts to make it to the front page. Want to know how much posts about the redesign got buried? Take a look at these images.
Without all buried stories, 241 pages with stories about “new Digg”show up.
But with all buried stories included, Digg’s search function returns 323 pages. Over 80 pages with 10 stories suddenly appear. Because searching for “new Digg” stories does not only return stories about the redesign, it’s more likely that around 750 stories about the New Digg got buried. Including qualitystories with sometimes over a hundreddiggs.
Digg launched the new profile looks yesterday and some big changes have been implemented. New features like multiple profile pictures, information about your personal interests, links to your own various websites, the possibility to add a bio and an IM-like system called ’shouts’ are live already. More features, including Digg Images, Digg Suggest and Digg Alerts, will be launched later this year. With changes like this, it’s not surprising to seesomemembersunhappy with “this new Facebook/ MySpace crap”, while others are very pleased to see Digg “finally delivering a social promise”.
A big change from an SEO point of view, is the ’submitted by friends’ section. Where it used to be very easy to please your Digg friends by digging the stuff they submitted, this has changed now. The mass digg option, -digging several articles within a few seconds- has been replaced by a two click system. Like with articles from the ‘Top 10 in All Topics’, which is displayed on the right side of the front page, it’s not possible anymore to digg articles without having to click at least 1 time first.
While some SEOs will see this as a bad thing, it eventually will be improving the quality of Digg. It used to be possible to get a front page listing mainly because of your friends clicking on one of your catchy titles. To test this, I submitted a five year old article with an off-topic title once. The article got buried, but only after it managed to receive 61 diggs.
With this new system, you’ll have to increase your link baiting efforts even more. Not only by increasing the quality of your articles (this profile change will result in more insights in what kind of articles really are diggworthy), but also by maintaining your friend network more intensively. Where it used to be possible to build a massive network of Digg friends while only spending 10 minutes a day on Digg, you’ll have be networking more thoroughly from now on.
You’ll also able to see who your real Digg friends are in the next few weeks. Those who are still digging your articles, even after they have to make a few more clicks to do this, probably are willing to invest time in building a high quality, two way Digg network. Those who stop digging almost every article you submit, probably weren’t that interested in your contributions. This either means that your submissions weren’t that good, or that he/ she wasn’t such a good friend after all.
I know this must be something like the 862nd way-too-positive post about StumbleUpon, but it really is one of my favourite websites. It rocks for serving me great, fun and relevant websites when I start stumbling. It especially rocks for bringing me lots and lots of visitors. Even though I received links from websites like SearchEngineLand and SEOBook this week, StumbleUpon still is my #1 referer. Some of my other websites and also a few client websites manage to receive thousands of visitors from SU monthly.
A common misconception is that StumbleUpon users are nothing but one-page surfers. While a part of the stumbling visitors only see a single page and leave, the linkerati also seem to use the nifty toolbar. One of my very first posts was only submitted to StumbleUpon, but managed to show up on several other pages, including a few very cool ones.
One of the most important things to keep in mind, is that StumbleUpon users are quite visual. Adding a single or a few cool, funny or relevant images improves the stumbleability of a page drastically.
Cameron Olthuis wrote up a great post about how to get traffic from SU recently and you can find even more StumbleUpon tips at DoshDosh, SEOptimise, BlogAnything and Del.ici.ous.
A must read is the post at SEJ, which offers a few great tips. One of these tips is that you really have to stumble posts, pages or website that link to your page or site. More traffic to their website can lead into more traffic to yours as well.
So if you haven’t checked out StumbleUpon (what I can’t imagine), go ahead and sign up.
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I know this must be something like the 862nd way-too-positive post about 
