How Not To Get Your URL Banned From Digg

A lot of bloggers feel that the key to increasing their traffic is to get on the Digg front page as often as they can. Most of these bloggers do so by scooping news, writing how to guides or even top 10 lists, but most don't realize that you have to be careful or else your URL will get banned from Digg.

When submitted stories are consistently reported as spam and users complain via our feedback email about submission spam, we ban the domain. The domain will not be unbanned. The domain would consistently get reported as spam otherwise. Please review our FAQ (digg.com/faq) for more information.

digg support

Here are some of the things that the Digg community considers spam:

Old news
Repeated stories that keep on getting submitted, such as "iPod Spoof Commercials".
Stories that provide basic information such as "How To Increase Your Blog Traffic". Although many of these types of stories hit the Digg front page, a lot of diggers hate them and are making noise about them by marking them as spam, or even emailing the Digg staff.
Stories submitted by website owners.

Before you or your friends start submitting your own stories to Digg, be careful and put the Digg community ahead of yourself. It does not matter if you are writing spam or writing good content, if the Digg community feels that you are spamming, your URL will be banned.

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Dharmesh Shah, November 26, 2006

This is a troubling direction.

Since blog authors don't control who posts their articles to digg (or which articles get posted), it would seem unreasonable to ban a domain simply because some user posted an article that they thought would be of interest to the community, but then gets flagged as SPAM.

This has the potential for abuse as malicious users could submit less than digg-worthy stories from a site in order to get the site banned.

Neil Patel, November 26, 2006

I think if others submit your articles naturally to Digg then they probably will be accepted by the community, but as you said this can be abused by malicious users.

Muhammad Saleem, November 26, 2006

Actually Neil, Digg users hate it when people submit from their own blogs, and usually comment by saying blogspam and so on. I know this makes absolutely no sense, but that's how it works.

Neil Patel, November 26, 2006

Muhammad, I agree with you which is why a lot of those URLs and Digg accounts eventually get banned.

Michael Heraghty, November 27, 2006

It's a tricky one for Digg management, and they have to get the balance right.

Spam is certainly annoying, particularly to hardcore Diggers. On the other hand, this opens the way to potentially malicious actions, as Dharmesh rightly points out.

A similar situation occurred when Google introduced its "Florida" algorithm in an attempt to tackle search engine spam.

There was a nasty side-effect: by creating "bad" links to a site, malicious competitors could now actually harm that site's ranking in the SERPs.

Eve Lester, November 28, 2006

great article, thanks. I have always been too scared to submit my own stuff to Digg, just from reading comments when others do it, now I am glad I never did!

Thilak, November 29, 2006

I didn't submit even a single post to digg until last week, but when I did.. I realized that I'm banned. I have no idea how :(

Gail, December 2, 2006

Don't feel bad. I was banned from a site submitting articles. I created an account and I noticed that my first article was accepted. As soon as I started creating more, they banned all of my stuff. I was wondering what was wrong. They don't explain anything to you. They tell you that you can suggest new catergories, and yet they don't accept articles on politics, and religion. If you don't see politics or religion they have another catergory which is other. So what is the problem? I told them that they could just get rid of me altogether and delete my account.