It appears Digg has changed the way it deals with sites it suspects of using foul means to get onto the much coveted Digg front page.

For a while Digg simply banned suspect sites, but then in February of this year it had a change of heart, but there was a catch. Stories from previously banned sites could be submitted, but almost all of them were then “auto buried”. That is, they were buried, seemingly by the readers.

However, the speed and regularity of the buries led many to believe that Digg had unleashed an autobury algorithm to punish sites that had cheated (by getting friends to digg stories, for example) in order to get onto the front page.

Digg never confirmed that there was an autobury algorithm in place, but as you’ll see in a moment there was certainly something going on, and it seems that Digg has again changed how it tackles the problem of gaming.

Take the example of self-proclaimed “Dot Com Mogul” John Chow whose blog at www.johnchow.com provides advice on how to make money online.

Between late September and February this year when Chow was readmitted onto Digg, only one John Chow story was not autoburied. In the past 11 days, only one of six John Chow stories submitted to Digg has been buried (correct at the time of writing).

Here’s another example. Pronet Advertising had a period of two and a half months when of all its stories were autoburied. That changed nine days ago.

Connected Internet still had three out of four stories buried in the past nine days. But that’s still a massive improvement. Previously, all stories submitted from Connected Internet had been buried (last non-buried story was almost two years earlier).

Should sites that had been previously found themselves buried start celebrating? Or for that matter, should anyone who tries to game Digg be celebrating? Absolutely not. Given Digg’s commitment to cracking down on gaming, it’s likely that all that’s happened is that the company has become more sophisticated about how it keeps suspect sites in check. Rather than simply targeting URLs of suspect sites, it may be monitoring voting patterns or specific users, for example. Or perhaps the autobury algorithm has just become more sophisticated.

Related:

Entry was posted on Monday, October 1st, 2007 at 5:37 pm under Internet.

Read more entries by John Pospisil.
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