Digg bears the brunt of riggers

Digg became one of the top sites for tech news because it lets Web-savvy geeks decide what's newsworthy, offer up stories they like and vote on their favourites.

Now, dubious Internet marketers are planting stories, paying people to promote items, and otherwise trying to manipulate rankings on Digg and other so-called social media sites like Reddit and Delicious to drum up more links to their Web sites and thus more business, experts say.

"People are trying to basically take advantage of Digg by artificially promoting a story with fake diggers or some other methodology of link swapping," Digg chief executive Jay Adelson said.

Unlike traditional news sites where editors decide what the news is, Digg emerged two years ago as an alternative where readers post links to stories from other Web sites that they think are newsworthy. The users hit a thumbs up button, giving it a 'digg' if they like the story or a thumbs down button if they don't like it. The most popular stories appear on the front page and users are encouraged to comment on stories.

The egalitarian nature of these aggregation sites has led a number of online publications, including CNET.co.uk's sister site, News.com, to add 'Digg' and 'Delicious' buttons that allow their own readers to recommend their stories to other users of the aggregation sites.

So it shouldn't be a surprise that marketers and spammers are a half-step behind. Since popular stories on Digg get linked to by blogs and other sites, marketers are doing everything they can to get content from their sites featured on Digg. The more links back to a Web site, the more it rises in search engine rankings and thus the more money that site can make.

Some marketers offer 'content generation services', where they sell stories to Web sites for the sole purpose of getting them submitted to Digg and other sites. This combination of spam and blogs is called 'splogs'. The stories often feature topics and keywords in headlines that are likely to appeal to the Digg crowd, such as 'geeks' and 'Apple'.

Lazier but still tricky marketers merely scrape content off legitimate sites to put up on their own sites in a technique called 'link jacking'. In essence, they are hijacking the links that should go back to the original site, experts say.

In a posting last week titled "The Spam Farms of the Social Web", blogger Niall Kennedy detailed how a suspicious item recently made it among the top five stories on Digg before the community 'buried' it. The Digg user submission links to a story entitled "Geek's Guide to Getting in Shape: 13 Surefire Tips" written by 'Dental Geek' for the i-Dental Resources blog. The blog site has links to other pages with ads that offer content creation marketing services and which collect money for dental plans sold, Kennedy said.

Digg isn't alone in these problems. News aggregator Reddit and Delicious, where users swap Internet bookmarks, are also susceptible, Kennedy said.

Thankfully, "the weight loss story never made it off the new page on Reddit", said Chris Slowe, senior programmer at Reddit, which was recently acquired by Conde Nast, owner of Wired Digital.