What would happen if Digg had a story that was so crazy popular it got over 16,000 votes in less than 20 hours? Now, what if that story leaked proprietary information and the folks at Digg got a cease and desist order? Now what if someone resubmitted the article? And that story got over 15,000 votes in 15 hours?

Digg is in a state of open revolt right now.

The controversy began when someone posted the 32 bit hex code that is used to encrypt HD DVDs. This code can be used to make copies of commercial DVDs. The Advanced Access Content System Licensing Administrator LLC sent Digg a C&D so Digg removed the story which was quickly reposted.

This is where things went wrong. Instead of explaining the situation, Digg admins deleted the stories relating to the issue and banned the account holders who submitted the stories. The controversy that ensued is still moving with hundreds of blogs and forums now commenting on the disaster. The issue at hand is not whether or not it was ok to post the HD DVD hex code but rather who is in control of user-generated websites: the site owner or the users that make it work.

Jay Adelson posted an explanation of Digg’s stance on the Digg Blog this afternoon — too little, too late. And missing the point - users don’t like heavy-handed tactics and banning accounts should be a last resort, not a preventive measure (as learned a while ago at another user-generated content site).

Ironically, Jay made this point:

“we all need to work together to protect Digg from exposure to lawsuits that could very quickly shut us down”

Digg and the Digg Mirror have both been down several times throughout the night. Currently, every story on the Digg homepage is about the HD DVD code or the controversy around how Digg handled the situation (see screenshot).

Update: Founder of Digg, Kevin Rose, has given in.

Posted in Customer Service, Promotion, Industry News, Marketing

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Early this week 14th Colony hit the Digg home page and also went popular on del.icio.us. It was an exciting ride and I thought I’d share some of the things I learned.

The article that “made it” is How to Choose a Breakthrough Domain Name. It is the first of a four-part series about selecting the best domain name for your website.

I found out the story had been submitted late Sunday night. Being clever, I voted for it making 14 Diggs total. I didn’t think much of it and went to bed. The next morning I had an email from Mike Levin of hittail congratulating me and suggesting I add a link to his site. (Sorry Mike, couldn’t do it but I’ll give you one here!)

I jumped on Digg and couldn’t believe my eyes - one of my articles had gone popular with more than 400 votes!

After that, I monitored progress using hittail. I discovered the article had been submitted to del.icio.us as well and went popular there too. Someone submitted it to stumbleupon as well. This brought a great deal of traffic in a very short period of time. I was a bit concerned about how my server would hold up but my host is excellent and there wasn’t even the smallest bump in performance - thank you Royalty Hosting!

First Day Stats

Digg: 12,527

Del.ic.ious: 616

Stumbleupon: 87

Other social bookmarking sites: 18

Other Important Sources of Traffic

Most people are aware of the domino effect of a Digg. Once a story goes popular on one social bookmarking site it usually shows up on others. But what I don’t see much discussion about is the RSS aggregators. Because Digg and del.icio.us and other social bookmarking sites offer RSS feeds of their popular stories many sites display these feeds leading to even more traffic. I put these in 3 camps: Scrapers, Personal Feed Readers and News Bites.

Scrapers - These sites just push out the feeds from the top social bookmarking sites without offering any unique content. Traffic: 421

Personal Feed Readers - These are accounts like bloglines or personalized portals. Traffic: 161

News Bites - Sites that offer their own content but have feeds on the side. Traffic: 4

Total Day 1 Traffic: 13,800+

Alexa Traffic Data

I titled this post “Minor Digg” because the article was only popular for a day. At some point the commenters realized that I not only recommend GoDaddy but I also have an affiliate link to GoDaddy within the article.

The article is several months old and GoDaddy was involved in a scandal at the end of February.

While I think the recent problem at GoDaddy was an isolated incendent, I should have taken a page from Dale Carnegie’s book and just let it go instead of attempting to defend myself in the comments. The article was not buried but new votes dropped considerably.

Dugg Trends Voting Data

Long-Term Effects

While the traffic dropped considerably for day 2, the total traffic from this experience has topped 16,000 so far. That’s a lot of exposure to people that probably wouldn’t have come across this site any other way. I don’t think that traffic is targeted but I did make a little extra money through Adsense… and yes the GoDaddy affiliate link also worked.

The article also picked up about a dozen new links. And got a mention on Geek News Central - how cool is that? (You can skip ahead to minute 35 to hear it yourself.)

Major Lessons

Be Prepared - You don’t know when something on your site is going to catch attention. As mentioned, this article was several months old. I was surprised to see it do so well so long after it was published.

Play Nice - I shouldn’t have argued with the Digg commenters. While some of them are rude it really is their territory and it is best to respect that.

Be cautious with ads - Although most Diggers don’t care about advertising, the “vocal minority” has a lot of power. I had forgot the affiliate link was there untill they pointed it out. That could have been handled better.

Stay Current - Recommending GoDaddy so soon after their PR mess hurt my results probably more than anything else. I still stand by them as they have worked well for me for almost 10 years. And I can only recall them being helpful when needed. Still, if my objective had been to really milk the exposure I would have changed that part of the article as soon as it was pointed out (and removed the link). Digg is about “news” after all.

Be Grateful - Thanks to everyone that Dugg this article. I had a lot of fun watching this effect in my logs and a bit of extra exposure for a business is always a good thing. I’d especially like to thank the guy that submitted it.

Posted in Reviews, Promotion, Marketing

5 Comments »

Greetings All,

A recent post over at SEO by the Sea got me thinking about Difficult Queries and Identifying Missing Content in Search Engines. I sincerely advise anyone who builds websites to read Bill Slawski’s article in full, particularly because it will explain how a recent patent application he describes suggests how this topic might be viewed and handled by the people who build search engines. From my own point of view, as a web designer/SEO, the implications of this patent take on a particular meaning in relationship to seeking out niches of content that have yet to be saturated.

To quote Bill:

“That last benefit is something that creators of web pages should pay attention to also. If information in a certain field or market tends to be hidden behind user logins or appears upon pages that aren’t very search engine friendly, search results for queries for that information may be not very competitive. ”

The reason SEO exists is for the very fact that people continue to build pages that are not search engine friendly. Therefore, should you discover that an important subject is only being featured on Flash/Dynamic-type websites, making the move to serve up content on the subject on nice, clean, easy-to-index pages could prove quite lucrative. Keeping your eye out for this type of situation is a smart idea, but I feel you may also run into indicators of holes in the Google index in daily Internet use. I know I have.

A bit of history

In brief, about 2 years ago, my husband and I were parked at a crosswalk while some pedestrians were crossing the street. While stopped there, we were rear-ended by a driver who wasn’t looking where they were going. I sustained some serious soft tissue injuries that have yet to clear up entirely, and that affect my capacity to do anything that involves my neck being held up (birdwatching) or down (working on my computer!). Being a complete novice when it comes to anything legal, I figured I’d better hire a lawyer to help me make a claim for pain and suffering.

Unfortunately, things have not gone well. Because insurance companies have decided that most people claiming soft tissue injuries are probably big fat liars, attorneys don’t like to take on clients in these cases. So, the insurance companies don’t want to give money to people injured in this way, and lawyers don’t want to take on cases that don’t offer the chance for big earnings. Great, huh? In point of fact, I was only able to discover one lawyer in my whole area of California who was willing to take on my case. I was so happy to have found this guy!

Until I signed a contract with him.

This attorney simply will not return my phone calls. I leave him a message once a week, and have now not heard from him for 6 months. I don’t know if he’s filed my claim. I don’t know if he’s living in Mexico now. I only know that his receptionist will only tell me that she’ll let him know I’ve called. She makes clucking and sighing noises when I express my concerns and distress that her boss is failing to communicate with me. The statute of limitations is up on my claim next month. I’m worried. The receptionist will be sure to let him know this, she says.

I’m betting you can hear the mounting frustration in my words here.

I’m not a litigious person and don’t come from a litigious family. I haven’t been able to get any personal advice about what to do about this dismissive attorney. So, I turned to Google and looked up “negligent lawyer california” hoping to find out what a California resident should do if their lawyer is ignoring them in this manner.

And that’s how I discovered a hole in the Google index.

Google thinks I’m looking for something completely different - a ‘negligence lawyer’; someone who handles cases involving neglect of children, the elderly, etc. Google’s top 30 doesn’t contain a single listing for the subject I’m trying to research - a lawyer who is neglecting me and my claim. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do in this situation I find myself. Do I contact a citizens’ advocacy group? I can’t find one in Google in my area. Or, is one supposed to contact the California Bar Association? I just don’t know, and I can’t find a website devoted to this important subject.

Subsequent searches worded in other manners did yield a few results for ‘lawyer won’t return phone calls’, but none of them are geotargeted to my region. That’s the problem…every state has its own laws and policies, so how such matters are handled in Arkansas may have nothing to do with our rules in California for ethical attorney behavior. Frankly, most of the information my search has yielded has been very poorly written snippets by clients who are expressing their anger about lawyers in either vulgar or joking terms…not a big help!

At any rate, what my experience of hunting for advice about what my options are for dealing with this inconsiderate lawyer has lead me to see is that the Google index does not currently contain an authority source on the subject. If I had a client who was a California lawyer, I’d seriously be suggesting that he/she develop a section of content about this very topic. The legal services field is certainly one of those tough ones to get high rankings for, but here is an opening, waiting to be explored by a smart developer.

I am in no way trying to slight the legal profession here. I am sure there are many fine people in this field and that I have been unlucky. Yet, at the same time, my search on this subject has made it abundantly clear to me that I am not the only unhappy client out there and that others searching for ‘negligent lawyer’ are not necessarily looking for an attorney to handle a negligence case. It is interesting that Google makes this assumption about my search term, and seems a strong indicator that search engines have a ways to go in truly refining queries to serve up correct, relevant content to the users.

In conclusion, if I was able to find this hole in the index by chance, web developers/designers will be likely to discover many more areas of similar opportunity if they are purposely seeking them, and this may be an excellent pursuit to begin exploring as the web continues to become ever more congested.

It’s not getting easier to get high rankings. We’ve got to get smarter about the niche, the long tail and specialization if we want to offer the very best and most creative services to our clients.

Posted in Marketing

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BigDoug brought some really great observations to SEO Refugee as the tenured webmaster of Branson Critic. Doug owns a few other sites as well and has a keen eye for promotion… if not website development! This post is an absolute don’t miss unless you want to learn Doug’s lesson’s the hard way.

Some key points:

• Revamping a website causes problems for both the search engines and users.
• DMOZ leaves a lot to be desired.
• Google and PayPal are the ones to watch.
• Money is getting to be more important online for promotion and to protect your civil liberties.

My favorite tip is Lesson fourteen: Do not drink while writing source code.

Posted in Industry News, SEO, Marketing, Web Design

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My wife had several women to the house the other night. Like any smart man I got the hell out of there. I went to the local Barns & Noble.

I looked through the magazines first. One that caught my eye was a 2006 wrap-up of advertising campaigns. I looked through the whole thing, inspecting and absorbing what everyone else is doing. I even took notes.

Then I lost myself among the books for a while. I noticed the barrage of colors and styles. My advertising receptors were at full power. And I paid attention to which books jumped out at me.

Next, I found myself in the business section. I found a great book by Tom Peters on design. What impressed me about the book is that it is about the importance of design. Design, argues Tom, is something everyone does (even if they don’t realize it) and is ultimately the defining factor in purchasing decisions.

Then I found myself in the Web Design section. I was looking at the new titles and noticed a lot of web design books are now about style and tricks.

By style I mean how-to-CSS books mostly but some reviews of what has been done and the aesthetic production of websites. I think just surfing around accomplishes the same thing… but is much less expensive.

By tricks I mean the latest Ruby on Rails, AJAX, Web2.0, delicious mash-ups and similar technologies. This is exciting stuff but I think every bit of code you can find in a book is also available online (free) and probably a bit cliché by now. How many new uses for tag clouds are there?

Then I found Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think!, which is a wonderful book on website usability. Krug talks extensively about the difference in what designers expect versus the reality of what viewers do. And then he points out some common usability errors. Again, most of this info is floating around online but having it all in one place created a few *Ah-Ha* moments for me. One particular moment came from a quote of Krug’s wife where she says that if something is hard to use, she’ll just use it less.

Krug also talked about people having only so much patience and once you’ve burned through it they are gone… with a negative image of your brand. I experienced this today with my new cell phone company. I got transferred so many times and asked the same information over and over again that I just got frustrated. I mean really, did I have to let them know I want English 4 times on the same call? Their operators were aware of the issue and kept apologizing in advance… If you know about the problem - fix it!

My cell phone company has an error in their customer communications. I ran out of patience and told them to cancel the service and that I’d be returning the phone. My view of that company is not favorable. It wasn’t any one thing that drove me to that point… it was a build-up of several small problems. When I caught myself saying “I don’t understand” for the tenth time (not exaggerating) I gave up. Their system is not designed well.

Back to Barns & Noble the other night. I realized something very important: people don’t buy products or services. They buy an expectation of an experience.

I’ve circled around this idea many times over the years but looking at thousands of books it really hit home for me. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, just a book that was written for me. Whose personality would be like mine. Whose writing style I could digest easily. Whose cover was flashy but professional. That would look good in my collection. That would be within a price range and deliver a certain value - sure! - but it had to fit my style.

So the question I have for you is how much value do you place on that element that defines your market? That thing that shows off your personality and style? How much do you value design?

Bonus follow-up question: Does your current design reflect your values or your customers values? (Guess which one will make you more money?)

I’ve been involved in design for over half my life now. I always knew on an instinctual level that it was important but even I underestimated how powerful design is… and how far-reaching it can be.

Design is how you communicate from the clothes you wear to the colors on your website. Design is how you communicate with everyone in your life from loved ones to employees to customers. A tank is designed to get a very different response than a bouquet of flowers. Your business image is crafted the same way and with the same results.

Posted in Graphic Design, Useability, Marketing, Web Design

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