CNet Exposes the 'The big Digg rig'

Tags: Digg + Niall Kennedy + Muhammad Saleem + Kevin Rose

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 favorites.

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.

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," ( http://www.niallkennedy...l-web.html)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.

Companies charge as much as $15,000 to get content up on Digg, said Neil Patel, chief technology officer at the Internet marketing firm ACS. If a story becomes popular on Digg and generates links back to a marketer's Web site, that site may rise in search engine results and will not have to spend money on search advertising, he said.

"Digg has become a big enough phenomenon that it does move ideas and in some cases generates enough traction that people can then buy into a product or a stock," said Kennedy, an independent researcher working on search technologies. "A fake story will affect the (PlayStation maker) Sony brand."

Kennedy was referring to an item headlined "Just out from Reuters 650,000 PS3s to be recalled!!" posted on Digg on November 20 that made it to the front page within hours, according to a blog posting titled "Limitations of Socially Driven News," written by Digg user Muhammad Saleem.

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