Jason Bartholme’s SEO Blog

A new Digg gaming site, Subvert and Profit, launched earlier this week with an army of at least 500 users. What does this mean for Digg? Well, there is now a collective of it’s users getting paid to vote on stories. Advertisers pay to have their stories “dugg” to ultimately get on the coveted Digg home page.

Subvert and Profit’s founders assure it’s users that their take extra precautions to stay off of Digg’s radar. They claim they are using proxies to verify participation, no linking directly to Digg, and a complex algorithm to disperse stories for their users to vote on.

If S&P’s minions get 50% of the approximate diggs, the story should get the other 50% from legitimate diggers. So about a $40 investment in S&P’s services to get potentially thousands of visitors. Christain Mezei lists the estimated number of diggs to get on to the home page:

1. Technology (and the sub-categories) - about 50 diggs required, but it may go up to 90.
2. Science (and the sub-categories) - about 65-70 diggs required, but it may go up to 85.
3. World & Business (and the sub-categories) - about 80-90 diggs required, but it may go up to 100.
4. Sports (and the sub-categories) - about 30-40 diggs required, but it may go up to 50.
5. Videos (and the sub-categories) - about 55-60 diggs required, but it may go up to 80.
6. Entertainment (and the sub-categories) - about 50-55 diggs required, but it may go up to 70.
7. Gaming (and the sub-categories) - about 35-50 diggs required, but it may go up to 60.

Will Digg tighten up it’s algorithm to get on the home page if Digg and Subvert eludes them for long enough? Also, can Digg distinguish between paid and natural visitors? It will be interesting to watch both S&P and Profit’s in the upcoming weeks and see if Digg is forced to react to this organized group of users.

Would you use Subvert and Profit’s services to get your story on the front page? Would it conflict with your morals as being a black hat method of traffic generation? I’m still undecided. I have yet to be on the Digg home page, so I don’t know what kind of benefit I could received from thousands of Digg users. On the other hand, seems rather cheap to get thousands of eyeballs for well under $100.