I’m sure we’ve all been using Digg to promote our sites from time to time, Most of these Social Bookmarking sites can get awesome results.
By blogging, adding your link etc to these sites can get a huge influx of traffic in a very short time. Which is what we all want right?

I have been using Digg, StumbleUpon, Del.ico.us and many other bookmarking sites to promote many of my websites, but I will never use Digg again. What? Why?

Let me tell you a story, In a very popular Webmaster forum (DigitalPoint) people can ask for what we call Digg Exchanges, where you Digg other peoples links, and they Digg your’s, sounds awesome! Yep, but thats what got me BANNED from Digg.

I simply ran a Digg exchange with MANY webmasters and got over 35 Diggs, Was very happy with this until I could no longer log in to Digg.

But how do you know that you’re banned? Well its hard to tell, you don’t get a nice email or a warning or anything, you just loose all functionality but get no errors.

Here’s a list of symptoms of me being banned:

- Cannot log into Digg, if you try you get a blank page
- Cannot signup to Digg, it redirects back to the Digg Homepage
- All my Digg URL’s have vanished, as well as my profile.
- All my friends are no longer friends with me (well on Digg :P)

Now you’re probably saying “No big deal, Try a free Proxy to signup and Digg.” Sure… it work’s I can signup, I can Digg other peoples links, but what if I try Digg AdminMania or get someone else to try? This beautiful message comes up…

“This URL has been widely reported by users as being regularly used to spam Digg’s submission process and cannot be submitted at this time.”

Damn, So not only does your account get banned, but your ENTIRE DOMAIN gets banned too!!! Lots of Webmasters have reported this happening to them also. Many popular sites including…

- John Chow’s blog
- DigitalPoint (may be unbanned now)
- SEONewsBlog
- CyberNet News

So take this as a lesson, Digg Exchanges are FAR TOO RISKY. The worst bit is I never got much traffic out of it anyway. From now on I will stick with the likes of StumbleUpon and other bookmark services as these seem to be MUCH better!

(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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