What is the “Digg Effect”?

The digg effect occurs when your website or an article, picture, or game on your website hits the front page of digg.com.
This causes huge amounts of traffic to be directed to your web server, essentially bringing it down.

Having your site or an article on your website make it to the front page, can be an exciting experience. Especially if you’re not used to the huge amounts of traffic that Digg.com sends your way. It can be a huge sense of accomplishment to have your article read by thousands of peeps. But all that can change to sorrow and despair when your website comes crashing down because of the traffic.

But, having the site brought down is not the worst way the digg effect can hurt you. Here are just a few ways digg can make a web masters life hell.

1. The most obvious one is having your site come to its knees. This can look bad when someone trying to access your site sees an error. This can turn off future visitors by making a bad first impression. If you wish to survive getting dugg, try and find the web hosts other sites use that get constantly put on the front page. Ask them where they host. Be prepared to spend some money tho. Many use a VPS.

2. If you have ads, having thousands of visitors and no clicks does decrease your click through value. Meaning you will get less cheddar per click. Since most of the submissions to digg go directly to the source, try not placing ads on the actual page where the post resides. Instead, place the ads on the main page.

3. Possible account suspension. Abusive web hosts will sometimes terminate or suspend your account due to massive resource use. This tends to happen more if you have a database driven website. Honorable webhosts will only sell you what you can use. Check their TOS to avoid this from happening. Again, ask around. See what hosts are reputable and fair.

4. And finally, Spam. The dreaded spam. If your site is fairly new, you probably wont mind some of the spam because, well, its feedback and everyone wants feedback. But after a while it does take a toll. There are many plugins (if you use wordpress and other CMS) that get rid of spam for you.

And those ladies and gentlemen, are a few ways digg hurts you in the web publishing world. Its nothing to cry about, but it can scar your online reputation. If you have personal experiences of surviving the digg effect, please let me know how you did it!

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