What Should You Expect After Getting on The Front Page of Digg/StumbleUpon

guest post by Darren Stankovich

People often do 2 things to social media:

• Glorify it to the point where they say “focus on social media, that’s all you should do!” or

• Say that social media is not worth anything, ignore it or focus minimally on it

You know what’s common here? Both groups had 0 (or very little) social media success. People dare to talk about social media because everyone else does! So you see a lot of self-proclaimed gurus.

There’s one interesting thing though…if you ask most people to define social media, they are all going to give you different definitions! Some will say it’s all about people and crowd sourced content. Some will say it’s about getting ‘popular’ on websites like Digg/StumbleUpon/Facebook/Twitter. My definition is the second one. And I’ll try to teach you what should you expect (and whether it is worth) getting popular on these sites (re-tweets and Facebook shares come naturally after you get featured on Digg and/or StumbleUpon by the way).

I know what I’m talking about because I’ve been multiple times on the front page of Digg and featured on StumbleUpon. Take a hugely popular post I wrote a while ago, for example, which received so far 150.000+ views from StumbleUpon:

Or this one (on a site I sold several months ago):

So what are the lessons I’ve learned while getting those huge amounts of traffic?

The ‘Natural Link Building’ Audience

Back in 2008-2009, before Facebook/Twitter REALLY took off, there was some percentage of people who naturally linked to what they considered to be useful content. So if you went on the front page of Digg / StumbleUpon, those people would usually see your article and link to it. You were happy, they were happy.

Things changed, however, after Facebook and Twitter took of. My opinion is that category of people migrated to those 2 social networks and left their blogs in the dust. Why? Because it was way easier to share useful content on social networking sites! All you needed to do is enter the link and press share! And the job is done.

More importantly, before Facebook/Twitter, a big amount of the conversation on the internet was happening on blogs. Nowadays, blogs are being used mostly as content managing systems. Nobody leaves comments (except when they want a link). Many posts/articles are re-tweeted hundreds of times but receive very little comments on the actual article. The conversation has shifted to a different medium.

I started to notice this while getting those huge amounts of traffic from StumbleUpon/Digg. My articles got a lot of re-tweets and Facebook shares but no actual links! Sure, if you get 100.000 views there might be 1 or 2 authority blogs who were ‘charitable’ enough to regularly share ‘interesting stuff on the web’ and include your link among many others in their post. But that’s it. One example is HowStuffWorks staff which regularly shares stuff they find on the front page on Digg (mostly) as ‘interesting reading’.

Is It Worth To Focus on Social Media These Days for Link Building?

No, for the short run. Yes, for the long run. Google is finally starting to get real and counting re-tweets/Facebook shares as more than a simple (no-followed) link. I’ve seen some news on SEO blogs about a statement from Google employee that they are including these factors when ranking some search results.

The major problem is probably this: How to make an algorithm that will count these ‘votes’ but also be resilient to abuse. I am guessing Google is working really hard on this.

Conclusion: Yes, it’s WORTH to focus on getting popular on social networking sites like Digg/SU in the long-run. I wouldn’t, however, invest more than 20-30% of my efforts there for now. Most of your efforts should go on receiving editorial and high-quality traditional type of links. As Google probably figures ways to better integrate social voting into their ranking algo, it’s a good idea to gradually start investing more effort in that area.

About the Author

In case you wondered what the hugely popular post was on, it was on free people search. You can check out my site which is my current project. You might get some social media content ideas from there as well.