There are a lot of debates when it comes to Digg and people like expressing their point of view no doubt about it. but when we talk about the Digg side effects we are talking about articles who reach the first page. Of course Digg has it’s own algorithm when it comes to ranking a page high but what could really happen if we were to have articles on the first page ?

Some people say that this would be some sort of bad luck because the traffic doesn’t convert well and certainly your site will crash due to high traffic (yea right) …

I think there are way many better (if not only) advantages for your site if you get articles on the first page of digg because:

Seo Advantages: You can get a lot of links (deep links) to your site with anchor texts that really do the job because of sites who use the digg mirror service or others who compose their articles reffering to you etc. Let’s not forget about other sites that collaborate with Digg or users who use more than one social bookmarking site thus giving you tons of backlinks.

Monetizing Ads: Even though your ads won’t convert as you would want them a huge traffic spike could earn you some decent money. Altough your traffic increased 20 times and your winnings barely tripled it’s still a progress no doubt about it.

Exposure: Having your story on the first page gives you great exposure. Basically all viral campaigns made it to the first page on Digg so if you have something to say why not do it the smart way

Readers: Everybody knows John Chow and what he did, how he monetized his sites, pissed off Digg and Google etc… But the smart thing i guess nobody though of was converting Digg fans into his own. This shows us that if you have some talent (when it comes to writing) you can easily convert readers and make them your own. Guess how the first page of Digg helps in this equation

So most people who say that Digg is this or that or fear of a server crash are just “little girls” who never experienced real traffic and of course they fear it. My logical piece of advice is get as much (content oriented if possible) traffic as you can get !

P.S. If you do find the secret of placing your article on #1 page of Digg don’t forget to whisper

While searching the Internet I stumbled upon a very interesting article on Seomoz about how to hide your content from Search Engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc).

When we’re talking about Search Engine Optimization we want to highlight content and promote pages/sites, try to bring them to the surface as much as possible and get the best rankings for certain keywords. But a lot of people want exactly the opposite, to hide and obfuscate that content, try to make it invisible to search engines.

There are mainly two reasons from my point of view and these are:

1. Confidentiality.

Many persons just want to keep their work hidden from vicious predators that SQL inject passwords, scrape content and generally steal others work.

2. Duplicate Content.

One of the very basic SEO rules when building a site is to stay away from duplicate content as much as possible. When a page is too similar with another (content, keyword descriptors, etc) search engines may think these pages were created only for the soul purpose of having as much content as possible so they penalize these pages. In the last years Google and other top search engines struggled to bring the best most relevant content to the top results so it would be wise to write long, quality articles to avoid duplicate content. The pages who are thought to be duplicates are moved to the supplementals section which is at the end of the results which means no traffic at all

Anyway the best methods and the most accessible ones too for avoiding these 2 problems are:

1. Using the robots.txt which can be found in the root of your site: www.myexample.com/robots.txt.

2. Using META descriptors : By adding < META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX,FOLLOW” > in the source code of your page (works per page only) will allow spiders to crawl your page, even your links but the only thing which will not get indexed will be your Content.