With all the chatter of Google punishing PageRank for Digg stories, I thought it's worth looking at the true value of links acquired from Digg or any social news site that uses dofollow.
To do this, let's consider the three types of links that Digg can help you get:
1. Primary links – direct links from Digg readers to your site.
2. Secondary links – indirect links from Digg readers who link via Digg.
3. Dud Links – links that result in neither primary and/or secondary links.
These are links that are solely from Digg and receive a negligible amount of PageRank.
The aim is to scoop up as many primaries and also secondaries as you can, with primary ones being the most desirable.
Typically you have little control as to the proportion of primary or secondary links that you get. If there is a good bit of banter within the Digg comments, there is a fair chance you will get a bigger dosage of secondary links.
So how do you know if you are getting primary, secondary or dud links I hear you ask?
Well that's where Yahoo Site Explorer comes in handy:
To illustrate this, let's look at the recent Digg/PageRank debate over at Sphinn. We are using Sphinn (digg clone) as the ‘Digg’ example.
http://sphinn.com/story/35232 – Sphinn page.
http://startupearth.com/2008/03/07/google-to-punish-pagerank-for-digg-stories/ – Orginal post.
Now go over to Yahoo Site Explorer and enter the above urls, making sure you click on the Inlinks link and show Inlinks "Except this domain".
Primary links
Secondary links
You will see that the primary links account for 13 links and the secondary links for for 8. There is one more step and that is to remove the secondary links from the above primary count. That sounds more confusing than it is, although it just means subtracting Sphinn links from from the primary ones.
Depending on how many primary links there are you may want to do this manually or export the TSV list provided by Yahoo. For this example, there are currently three Sphinn links, leaving 10 primary links as of writing. As I am linking to both, I suspect these numbers will change fairly soon.
Patrick Altoft gave me the idea of for this post in a post of his own and I agree and disagree with his last comment.
Remember that the aim of Digg isn't to get links from Digg, it's to get links from Digg readers websites.
I think Patrick’s wording is not quite right and using my analogy above I would say that the aim is to get both primary and secondary links via Digg.
I maybe wrong, but I suspect Google's algo already covers the whole Digg/PageRank spectacle. After all it’s only PageRank that we are talking about.
And this leads to the question, why would Google team up with an external party to sort out its own PageRank issues? It just doesn’t add up to me.
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