How Spammers Use Digg to Scam Search Engines and Digg Members

Naill Kennedy does some sleuthing worthy of Sherlock Holmes to explain how spammers are gaming social media sites like Digg.

The reason they do it: Money honey. They're gaming search engines. In the example Kennedy cites, dental terms targeted cost up to $18 a click, offering incentives for top organic search conversion.

Unlike, for example. the Marketing Profs Forum, where members authority is ranked by other members, Digg users are ranked by the frequency of their activity. More checks and balances are possible, and needed, that won't interfere with ease of using the site.

This is a great expose and debate. I agree that establishing authority, credibility, having systems that implicitly enable peer-peer checks and balances (e.g. ebay feedback) is a MUST HAVE feature for socially-driven sites.

I also think that these socially-driven systems should bake in features that implicitly capture and rank one's level of expertise in any given topic (tag) - something akin to a SME meter for taggers. I'm thinking along the lines of a light-weight peer review process -- perhaps wikipedia is the model for this. Or maybe it's something similar to the peer review process that authors of articles published to scientific journals go through to vet their work.

I think this, along with more effective tag and relationship building & mgmt features are essential to bringing this stuff to the masses.

Yes, very well said. and that's exactly why I used the MarketingProfs example.