Why Digg gets Dug

Face it, closing your eyes and wishing for ranking isn't going to work. There are a lot of Web 2.0 companies out there banking on search engine popularity, but to get this takes a lot more than a good product, service, or website design. Some companies are successful because they have taken the time to build a website that will get them in the door with search engines in a big way. Digg.com is one of these sites and probably one of the most successful social networking sites out there. So what is it that makes gets digg.com dug by search engines? Here are a few things that digg.com does which make it so popular with the search engines.

Links

Google shows that 63,600 web pages currently link back to digg.com. This is a big number and when search engines get involved digg.com quickly gets a ton of keyword rankings. One of the great things for digg is that the number of people talking about digg.com is steadily increasing. This will continue to increase their link popularity and gain even more favor from search engines.

Navigation

Digg.com makes great use of static navigational links. They have navigation options on the left or right side of each page, top navigation, and navigation underneath the logo (for category pages). There are also navigational links in the footer of every page. All of this helps Google and the other search engines index all of their pages. If you go through the trouble of making a good website, make sure the search engines see every page. Digg.com has a whopping 8.7 million pages indexed in Google, which is certainly going to help with the search engines.

Content

One of the main things that search engines want to see in a website is good content. "Content is king", and digg knows this. Their content is constantly changing, which keeps the search engines crawling it. Search engines don't like stale sites, so a site with ever-changing content makes a big difference.

Code

Code is an important factor of search engine optimization. Digg's code is clean, they make good use of alt tags and unique title tags, they use CSS instead of tables, and they do it all with less code. You don't want search engine bots to crawl through 10,000 lines of code when the page could have been done in 1000. Overall, the site is section 508 compliant with just a few warnings. This is nice and clean and search engines dig it.

All of these things come together and make Digg.com extremely powerful for search engine ranking. They have ranking for keywords on Google like "apple boot camp", "free USB drives", "weirdest keyboards", "cell phone hacks", "300 GB Seagate" and tons more. There are a few things they could still do such as a sitemap and meta description tags on all their pages, but overall they have done a great job and taken advantage of some key elements that really help with ranking. The take away here is to understand all of the things that digg.com has done and keep them in mind when optimizing your site. Getting just a percentage of this accomplished might put you miles ahead of your competition.

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