Digg is back and it’s one of the biggest SEO opportunities of the decade… but also one of the biggest SEO risks.
Jump Ahead
Background
Digg is the precursor to Reddit. Reddit beat it and it shut down.
Reddit is highly prioritized in Google, ranking for 700 MILLION keywords, getting 2 billion organic clicks a month. It influences AI a ton. The average person sees Reddit in search results and all over ChatGPT.
Digg, due to its previous popularity, has an SEO domain authority of 92/100 – meaning it has SEO power to rank for many searches, and also influence AI.
Just launched
3 days ago. The original co-founder of Digg, Kevin Rose, teamed up with a co-founder of Reddit, Alexis Ohanian, to relaunch Digg with a fresh slate.
Communities (the subreddit equivalent) are wide open for grabs. At the time of writing you can still claim communities like pokemoncards, bronx, techno.
And many usernames are available:
(If you claim multiple usernames, just make sure to use different IP addresses and incognito windows. For Reddit, this wouldn’t be enough protection, but because Digg just relaunched, it appears its filters are very immature.)
Play 1: Go hard with SEO
This is what aggressive SEO looks like on Digg:
Keyword goes in post title and beginning of first sentence of post. Oftentimes the post is a listicle rating different products/services where the post author puts themselves first.
You get extra relevance with Google’s algorithms if you’re in a relevant community.
Post is shared on social media or linked to from a website – this gets Google to crawl it. Digg’s high authority ranks the post.
Why not Reddit?
- This still happens a lot on Reddit.
- But Reddit has sophisticated spam filters and restricts new accounts.
- The biggest subreddits are already well-moderated. It’s easier on smaller subreddits, but there’s still a fair amount of moderation.
- Right now, there is very little moderation on Digg.
This strategy is not without risk:
- New platforms without moderation, like Digg, could get overwhelmed by spam and act by site-wide banning the brand names or URLs of bad actors as a quick anti-spam measure.
- The SEO community on Digg has already been removed and users are blocked from creating a new one.
- You can lose your accounts.
Play 2: Share in a transparent way
Still target keywords, just not as aggressively. Don’t just make posts recommending your brand; post in multiple communities.
If you want to make a self-promotional post, do it in a community without many posts or in your own community.
Note that bigger communities will have more active moderation.
Avoid posting clearly AI generated text.
Better yet – if you share, even say you are the business owner / author of the article you are sharing. And try to give value (like a TLDR) in the post without requiring people to click into your link.
This is way safer than relentlessly doing SEO in the biggest communities.
Play 3: Develop a major community in your niche
Digg was once huge; it can get huge again. At the helm are seasoned founders, one of whom is a co-founder of Reddit.
Instead of just thinking about SEO, bet on Digg growing.
Claim a major community in your niche. Grow it without major spam.
Then you’ll have a trusted, large community in your niche with a real audience which you can later use for the occasional self-promotion and SEO!
If you think Digg can get huge again (and given Google’s and LLMs’ focus on citing UGC, it’s not unrealistic), a major community name in your niche is prime Internet real estate.
Get one, post in it every couple days, and remove excessive spam from your community. If you’re proud of the community you have, share it with the co-founders of Digg – they have huge audiences and may promote it for you, getting your community even more members. You literally see Digg promoting growing communities right now.
This is the safest, most white hat way to use Digg for SEO and marketing.
Ads in ChatGPT
I have to mention this before I go – it’s been an exciting week.
ChatGPT announced it would be running ads to users of its Free tier. 95% of ChatGPT users are on the free tier. ChatGPT claims to have 800 million weekly active users…
People created generational wealth being the first advertisers on Google, Facebook, etc.
When Elon bought Twitter, many advertisers left and they completely overhauled their ad system. As a result I was getting 2 million impressions for a dollar.
A lot of people, including myself, are speculating ChatGPT ads will be wildly underpriced at launch – with many major advertisers taking months to get up and running.
AFAIK it hasn’t been announced how to become an advertiser on ChatGPT yet, but when it does get announced, I’ll update everybody.
Long term marketing
With the exception of “Play 3: Develop a major community in your niche,” everything shared in this newsletter are short term growth hacks.
Yes, the short term hacks have major upsides and are cool and fun, but…
The absolute greatest gains come from compounding a brand over time.
This could be with social, with community, or with SEO authority and proper keyword targeting.
My SEO course shows a faster way of doing SEO – finding lucrative purchase-intent keywords that are under-targeted, and making pages aligned with Google’s guidelines that quickly satisfy intent.
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My pages with this method have been ranking #1 for their target purchase-intent search terms since 2019 – without me even updating the pages:
And partly as a result of these durable rankings, topical authority (your ability to rank for more keywords in your niche) is able to scale.
My SEO course is a full step-by-step walkthrough, with video screen sharing, templates, and directions on how to find these purchase-intent keywords, how to make pages for them, structure your site for them, get backlinks for them, and make sure your site is optimized for what search engines and LLMs reward.
13.5 hours and extremely thorough. Get the #1 method of using SEO for acquiring customers, users, and warm leads at https://edwardsturm.com/compact-keywords/
