Corporate Blog Optimization

With this post I intend to respond to those companies who have a Corporate Blog who wonder how the system works behind the ranking of stories submitted to digg, analyze algorithms for sorting and spam detection, in relation to the life cycle of a “submission”. In the near post will try to provide practical advice to anyone who intends to exploit this marketing site for the promotion of its content and corporate blog optimization.

First, a brief introduction: digg is a system of voting news (ok, maybe you should say voting item), where the community can offer stories, videos and podcasts and vote on the material submitted by others. The URL of the most popular stories are included on the home page, and there remain for some time receiving much attention the huge user base and site visitors – including spiders.

We will then examine the community and the whole social aspect of the site to better optimize the corporate blog, now it is time to focus on algorithms digg.

After the submission

When someone sends a story, this will end in “upcoming” section of choice: it contains all the latest stories sent, ordered by date. See “upcoming” category contains more higher in a special mini-list of stories “hot” (or those halfway between the stories “upcoming” and “popular”) of all sub-sections. The first hours of life of a story are also those who decide the fate: if you do not receive sufficient attention as long as that remains the front page of the “upcoming”, will have other opportunities to become popular. Conversely, with the achievement of a minimum number of digg, the story earns a place in the “hot”, which is the antechamber of the home page.

Not all votes are equal

But beware: the “diggs” have not received all the same. Like other social sites, the votes of the members have just entered a lower value, while there is a maximum weight of transmissible from your vote that even the most active users can overcome.

A user arrives to give full weight to votes after a short period of time from registration, but not before having expressed a certain activity on the site.

A equal length of two users, is given more weight than the vote that sent the largest number of stories promoted on front page (also in relation to the total number of stories asked: this information is visible in every profile), and those who have contributed more to promote in front page stories of others. Receiving votes in the initial stage by some very influential people helps a lot.

I do not know yet if this calculation takes into account also the sections where you voting has promoted the largest number of stories in relation to the section of membership of history that is by voting (ergo, it is not clear whether there are “power accounts” with different weights according to the categories or if their influence is calculated globally, but personally favor the first hypothesis).