If you've ever had a small website have an incredibly popular outing at Digg, the following story is probably quite familiar. Many months later - seven, in this case - the referrals from Digg, whilst having dwindled to very few, keep rolling in on a somewhat regular basis. You didn't think much of it because you'd become accustomed to seeing that page or those pages get Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, and other social media traffic. At some point, however, you wonder if the traffic from Digg will ever really stop... and then you wonder how people get from within Digg's dungeon of never-ending archives to your site. How on earth were people finding my linkbait from a page like this, whose content constantly changes. Do people really click back through 273 slow-loading archives, see my dugg item, and then click through?

I don't think that the majority of this archive-wandering Digg traffic was truthfully coming from Digg itself. I believe that a lot of these people started at search engines. Initially, I blamed Google entirely for this, as I'd always see Digg pages ranking for certain phrases. I don't feel that including Digg results in SERPs is much different to including search results pages from within existing websites. Why on earth would I prefer to see a page's Digg submission rather than the page itself? I can get my fix of derogatory comments, badly-worded puns, and blatant misunderstandings from a variety of sources; however, if I search for a specific phrase and that phrase relates to some sweet linkbait, I'll probably be happiest if a search engine just lists the URL that was dugg.

Google used to be terrible at this. While it doesn't really matter much to me as a searcher (despite my complaints in the previous paragraph), being usurped in favour of Digg is very annoying to a webmaster or author who put some work into a site and received social media love. I'm assuming that Digg gets its archives indexed and ranked more frequently than Reddit simply due to its structure, and I don't often see Reddit results in the SERPs.

Digg pages still show up in Google searches, but I'm of the opinion that the problem has improved. I don't use Yahoo as much as I should (although I'm making a concerted effort to give equal time to the three main engines because I think it makes me a better SEO), but I've noticed that one of my pieces of linkbait won't rank at all at Yahoo, while its Digg page gets significantly better treatment. Why, Yahoo? All you've done is add one extra click for users who want to see pictures of interesting things in rear / side view mirrors.

In contrast, Google just lists the URL of my page, as if it knows that no one needs to see an old Digg entry. Live was impressed with neither Digg nor my site, which I found oddly okay, since I'd almost rather not be included at all than see Digg receiving rankings for my silly photograph. As an aside, I know that I could have actively built far more links to my linkbait; however, I think the amateur "for-fun" aspect of this particular piece of bait is important in terms of this on-going experiment. With no linkbuilding effort, it's impressive to me that Google still recognises my page as being more important than a Digg URL, given Digg's strength and authority. Also note that I've since abandoned the Digg account I used to submit the piece. Very odd Diggers started to address me by name, so it appeared to be time to break out one of the sock-puppets for commercial use.

I don't know if anyone else has noticed this change, but I definitely see fewer Digg results at Google now than I did a couple of months ago. Various web stats seem to confirm this, as the number of referring URLs like http://www.digg.com/all/popular/achives/insanelylongtimeago/popularstories/212/ has gone down significantly. Traffic from Google, surfing in on keywords relating to linkbait, has replaced those referrals... and gone up a bit, since I'm sure many people clicked through to Digg and never to my site.

I believe this highlights a fantastic improvement in the way Google looks at the Internet and its understanding of what we want when we search. It must be far easier just to crawl Digg and bring up its archives when someone enters a longtail query that matches some obscure piece of bait, but "things that are easy" and "things that are worthwhile" aren't usually the same. And, as I mentioned above, "it's just one extra click." However, remaining the premier search engine comes down to providing the best results. If Google (or anyone else) can eliminate those extra clicks, whether they be back through SERPs or within other websites, their uses will recognise the improved searching experience. And my content will continue to rank higher than Digg, which will make me a happy linkbaiter.