You may have heard stories about how Digg can help you move up the search engine rankings and double or triple your SEO conversions. But is that really true? The simple answer is yes and no. Digg, Wikipedia, and all other Web 2.0 social networks have pretty much implemented the no-follow tag on their links. So you get a link but it is pretty much ignored by search engines. Does that mean that you should not go after these links? That’s not true at all. Unlike some SEOs claim, no-follow links are actually very valuable, if they are obtained from the right sources. For instance, Digg links don’t help your rankings directly, but if your story shows up on the front page of Digg, you can get a thousand or sometimes more backlinks from various sources. Not every story shows up on Digg’s home page, so you can’t expect to get those results. Nevertheless, adding Digg and other social media sites to your SEO campaign can help out a lot in the long run. But whatever you do, you want things to happen natually. Anythin that looks unnatural is bad for you and your business (Whether its adding 1000 links in a minute or digging 20 of your own stories on Digg).

That’s the million dollar question. What happens if you Digg your own article? According to Digg, you are free to submit your own articles. But in general, it’s a good idea to your readers submit your articles to Digg. Now I did submit my article to Digg a couple of months ago and in 3 days my site was completely dropped from Google. I am by no means suggesting that had anything to do with my ranking drop, but it’s interesting that it has happened to a bunch of other people as well. What’s your experience with Digg? Have you experienced such an issue?

I did this experiment the other day to figure out how long it would take for a site to get indexed on Google. I basically went to 1&1.com and registered a brand new domain. Then I put a blog on it, and wrote an article about Amazon Kindle. Then I submitted it to Digg. Once it got a few votes, I was sure that I would be indexed rather quickly, but how quickly you might ask: 2 days. Actually the whole process took two days, from domain registration to getting indexed on Google. I wonder if anyone has managed this in a shorter period of time. What does the guinness book of records say?

Well, finally decided to add Digg functionality to SEOABC after preaching it for quite some time now. I didn’t want to get down and dirty with Wordpress’ PHP code, but it turned out that Digg integration is fairly simple and straight forward except you want to pick the right color. The moral of story here is to implement these social media widgets earlier than later on your website to get traffic and precious links from Digg and other social media sites. Let me know if you need help with the code. Happy new year everyone!