Case Study: Digg Versus Google News Traffic

I had an unusual event yesterday at the
Search Engine Watch Blog. One of our stories
hit Digg at the same time another story became
wildly popular through Google News. One
case study does not a rule make. I repeat again, one example is not the rule.
But in this case, Google News produced traffic way, way over what Digg did.
Below, a look at what happened, with a lot of observations on the long search
tail, getting credit through Digg, some fun stats and more.

Yesterday, I wrote a big story about how Yahoo had won among the search
engines in being most relevant for providing election results,
In The Election
Results Race, Yahoo’s The Winner. That story made it into Google News.

Meanwhile, Barry had written a brief that made it into Digg,
Australia’s
Proposed Copyright Rules Would Make Search Engines Impossible, Warns Google.

Both spiked in popularity around the same time. You’d find our story on
Google News in the top keywords results, as I’ll explain more below, for several
hours. Our other story was on the Digg home page for roughly the same amount of
time, as best I can tell.

Let’s do the numbers first. The election article drew 25,475 visits from
Google yesterday. That’s a ton compared to what we’d normally see for a story from Google News. Google was by
far the biggest referring source to it (next highest was 400 visits). The
Australia article drew 4,995 visits from Digg (the next highest was 346
visits).

Overall, Digg — that site so many focus on getting traffic from — provided
only 20 percent of the traffic Google sent. But as I said, one example a rule
doesn’t make. I can’t do any big takeaways, but I can provide a number of
caveats and observations you might find interesting.

First, Search Engine Watch is fortunate enough to be included in Google News.
Not every site has that opportunity while any site potentially is Digg fodder.
If you aren’t a news site, Google News won’t likely show you love, any more than
Yahoo News or other news search engines will. In contrast, Digg is more open to
you.

Next, I tapped into an incredibly interesting news topic with an unusual spin
at the precise time that Google had fairly poor results for that topic. Go back
and read my article, and you’ll see how I assumed tons of people would be
searching for "election results" on Google. The article is about how when I
tested this, I was disappointed in what came up.

I wasn’t the only one. Some of the feedback I received:

Good article on the election searches. I found the same thing. Google was a
mess of looking and researching. You would of thought they could do better.

===

As a political science major I just wanted to tell you that I loved your
blog/research on the election results of Yahoo and Google. I loved it–even
though I am a diehard Google fan! Thanks for a great post!

===

I’m just sitting here laughing as I read your column on Yahoo’s search
engine. I’ve been googling and I keep screaming, but who won? LOL At least I
did get the hit to your article so now I can go to Yahoo’s home page.

After I wrote my article, it started appearing on Google News for the same
query I thought people would be searching for. As a plus, since it was clearly
not on the same topic as some of the other articles, it stood out. It also
stayed at number one or two through much of the day.

I can’t tell if most people came because they couldn’t find what they wanted
on Google News or instead thought it was an interesting spin. I can feel good
that I know if they read the article, they certainly got to election results
through it.

Another observation. I’ve seen traffic spikes from Google News before. Almost
always, these have come because Google has inserted us on the one of the Google
News browsable pages, such as the Google News home page or the
Google News Tech page.

That makes sense. Lots of people browse news, so that will perk traffic. In
contrast, any single news event might have a variety of terms that generate
traffic.

This time, it was the opposite. Perhaps lots of people on Google News turned
to keyword searching because browse mode wasn’t cutting it. Perhaps I just
tapped into a motherload of keyword popularity.

Speaking of which, how about some
long tail/search tail love in action.
Here’s the top 20 terms sending traffic to that story:

Those come from my Google Analytics reporting for the site. It’s not entirely
accurate [though pretty close], because there are terms I can see that clearly
weren’t consolidated. For example, consider this:

Those are actually all the searches using the words [election results] beyond
the big chunk of 7,307. You can see a small group used title case, in other
words searched for Election Results rather than election results. That wasn’t
consolidated into the overall totals (some like it separate so they can see the
difference).

Some of the others, like that chunk of 111 down further in the list were
those who searched for [election results ] with a space after the word. So the
searches for election results as a term were slightly higher if you count in all
the variations.

Overall, the top term I thought was important certainly was. But there were
3,025 terms in all, or so Google Analytics reports to me. Let’s see that as a
chart:

Yes, that’s a tail! I wanted to show the whole thing. It doesn’t look like
much because around term 150 or so, all the queries are "onesies," terms searched for
only once.

Let’s zoom in:

And now let’s really understand what the search tail / long tail is all
about. I’ve long told people all those smaller terms add up. Here are the first
ten terms versus the combined traffic of all the rest:

Who doesn’t like the tail! Now to be fair, doing well for one core word is
going to make your tail much, much longer. But down the line, I’m going to do a
chart like this for all the terms for Daggle, which gets high traffic for no particular term at all.
Despite that, all the onesies and twosies add up!

But what about Digg? Yesterday, our brief about Australia possibly wanting
search engines to operate on an opt-in basis made it to the Digg home page for
several hours. Google News traffic was well above what Digg sent — but for what’s
still a relatively small and unknown service to the larger internet audience
(compared to Google), Digg certainly can drive the users (just as Slashdot can).

Getting on Digg had nothing to do with me. Well, pretty much nothing.

For several weeks now, I’ve been monitoring if people submit one of our
stories to Digg. I generally don’t bother trying myself — I’ve done exactly one
myself. But if someone else likes one of our stories, it makes sense to know that and stick up a
button on your story so others might vote for it. That’s why Digg explicitly
provides them.

Monitoring is easy. Go to Digg and search for your domain name, like this:

http://digg.com/search?s=searchenginewatch.com

By default, it will show you all stories for the past seven days, which is
enough. Look on the page, under the ads, near the right-hand side. You’ll see a
feed icon. Put that in your feed reader. Now you’re monitoring. If one of your
pages is submitted, you’ll know about it.

That’s what happened with the Australia story. I saw someone had submitted
it, and when I looked, it had about six or seven Diggs. To help it along, I added
a Digg button. You can get one

here from Digg. I actually prefer using code that I lifted
from SEO Blackhat’s

tips on getting to the front page of Digg. Here’s the code:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://digg.com/api/diggthis.js">
</script>

<iframe src="http://digg.com/api/diggthis.php?u=
http%3A//REST-OF-DIGG-URL-HERE" frameborder="0"
height="82" scrolling="no" width="55"></iframe>

See that part in bold. Go to the page about your story on Digg, like the page
for our recent story here:

http://digg.com/tech_news/
Australia_Can_Go_Back_To_Pre_Internet_Era_Warns_Google

Copy the part in bold, everything from the // onward and paste as shown
above. Now you’ve got your voting button.

I can’t tell if voting from my site drove the story higher on Digg or those
at Digg itself made it happen — but inserting the button couldn’t have hurt.

Unlike those who were happy to find my election story via Google News, several of the
comments on Digg were people who resented us. Several, but to be fair, a tiny
number compared to all the comments on the page (though larger if you add those
who Dugg agreeing with those comments).

If you don’t like vulgar language,
don’t read below. And don’t read Digg period, where those commenting often seem
unable to express themselves without cursing:

It’s called linkjacking, Bloggers love to write a 3 line description of a new
article they saw then post it here in order to get people to read their crapass
blog.

===

Yeah link jacking is the bane of the internet…

I run a *real* site based upon the blog backbone - one which actually has
*real* content rather than stolen articles, stupid email fwds and linkjacks,
and it’s infuriating that these people have turned "blog" into a dirty word…

If you want to create a site with quality content, report on new unique
things, that’s fine… if not, adsense isn’t going to save you… piss off and
join a pyramid scam or sell used cars… your spam is not welcome on the
internet.

===

When are people going to realize that BLOGS ARE NOT NEWS! They are written
by self-important windbags who were either not skilled enough to become
journalists or sensationalists.

These people were reacting to the fact that the person who submitted our
story put us up on Digg, rather than putting in the
actual article
about the potential Australia move.

Not that I thought it would do any good, but I did explain on Digg that we
didn’t submit the story and that perhaps the person who did pointed at us
because we also gave the context of the Australia move in relation to the recent
Belgian move against search engines. For my efforts, well, you can read the
further comments. At least Matt Cutts jumped in with a kind word to say maybe I
wasn’t full of it. Thanks, Matt!

Another person, responding to why Digg was linking to us rather than the news site,
said this:

it’s the payment for posting the news.

If that is why we got the link, I thought it was very kind and fair. Barry
and I blog throughout the day at Search Engine Watch. Some stories we find on
our own. Some stories are original content we have created. Some stories we find
through others. If we find them through others, we almost always credit that source
somehow, usually through a "via" credit. They found something for us. They
deserve some type of credit even if we want to point to the actual story.

Jason Calacanis, running his Digg-rival Netscape,

spoke to this exact issue recently:

One of the things that really frustrated bloggers when digg became popular
was the fact that digg insisted that users link directly to stories–not the
bloggers who found the stories. So, if Boingboing or Engadget found something
interesting digg instructed the community to bypass those blogs and link
directly to the source information.

The result? It looked like digg found the story and the people doing the
hard work–the bloggers–got no credit.

The result? digg gets credit for being the place where cool things break,
when in fact many of the stories are–for lack of a better term–stolen.

Now, I understand why digg came up with the rule. There were folks acting
as "middle men" between good content and digg users. They would post a good
story and link to their blog which provided no value. We have the same problem
at Netscape today and we tell folks to not break the "middle man" rule which
states that if you link to yourself you have to provide some significant value
that the original source does not.

However, this doesn’t solve the giving credit for finding something cool
problem.

To solve this I’ve asked the Netscape team to add a [via WEBSITE ] link at
the end of story capsules to give credit to the bloggers who work so hard to
find these stories (see image above in yellow). I understand the issue because
I’m on both sides of it running a blog network and a social news site.

I think this is a great idea. The only problem is that ordinary people at
Netscape can’t do it. If they spot a story on some blog, they can’t do the via
thing at all — only the higher level Navigators can. At Digg, that’s not an
option at all. It should be, at both places.

I was also bemused by the people who knew nothing about the Search Engine
Watch Blog and so assumed it was all contentless AdSense fodder. It’s obviously
not, with plenty of long, detailed original content. I’ve written many, many
times on this particular issue going back for years, such as
this story
from 1998. But even a short brief like this is noteworthy of some credit being
paid to the blog that found it.

Specifically in this case, I spotted the Australian story through one of the
news monitoring alerts that I run, one on Yahoo. It was a small story that I hadn’t seen
anywhere else and that someone outside the search space might have easily
ignored. I asked Barry to put it up.

Throughout the day, I didn’t see any of the over 100 blogs or news sources I
monitor mention it. To my knowledge, we were the first ones that found the item and flagged it as
something people should really look at (and apologies if I’ve missed someone
prior to us).

That flagging helped someone at Digg raise it to their community’s attention.
The Digg community clearly cared about it, since it made it to the home page. For our
efforts, and there was effort involved here, some dismissed us as messing with the news process rather than being
the reason Digg found out about this so quickly at all. Moreover, what we did in
this case is exactly what those at Digg do — spot news items and blog them up
via Digg.

Also consider this, in terms of how we helped Digg. Right now, there’s
some buzz (and
here) on how Digg beat Google News
to getting the word out about the Rumsfeld resignation. OK, for one thing, the
often dismissed as no longer useful mainstream media (MSM) made that happen. It
was an Associated Press article that had the news, not a leak to some blogger.
Someone at Digg spotted this MSM report, alerting the Digg community. With AP,
Digg wouldn’t have been "ahead" of anyone. But the story here is how Digg "beat" Google News.
That’s valid, but I think the old-style news sources deserve some mention in all
this. (Postscript: After I wrote this, I came across Stray Packets

talking about this exact issue in more depth).

And back to that Australia story? It came through a personal news alert I run. No one on Digg spotted
the story before I did, yet given the number of Diggs, clearly people at Digg cared about
this important issue. Someone at Digg reads our blog, linked to us with the news
we were carrying and the Digg community benefited.

Not bad for some
link-jacking, windbag-run, three-line description-writing blog full of stolen
articles that’s using AdSense because there’s no pyramid scheme willing to
employ those of us not skilled enough to become journalists.