Posts by Gemma

Digg is essentially a user-driven news website resource. The users of the site can be thought of as researchers, who find useful articles and news stories from all over the web and then submit them to Digg. These news articles can then be read by other users who in turn submit new stories that they have discovered and deemed useful.

At its heart Digg is a democratic approach to a news website where all the users are editors. Once an article or post from a site has been submitted to Digg, it waits in a queue where review users can view it and decide whether they like the submission or not. If they like it then they select the ‘Digg it’ button. If it is liked by enough reviewers it makes its way to the Digg home page.

Digg was originally founded in 2004, and has become popular over the years. The new version of Digg, released this week, provides us with new facilities in keeping up to date with the latest technologies, by entering into social media and attempting to take advantage of all that this market has to offer.

What are the new changes that it has made?

The new Digg has seen the largest update by the site since its launch and is now up to Version 4. So, what are the new updates?

• Allows users to submit articles, Digg content and load pages at a much faster rate.
• Users can now create new custom pages called ‘My News’ which allows users to view and access content from their friends and those they follow.
• Did I just say follow? Yes, I did. The new Digg takes this element from Twitter and allows users to follow others and view what they have Dugg (Like twitter updates) on their ‘My News’ page.
• Of course there is a new slick design to go with the above!

According to Digg’s founder, Kevin Rose, this is just the beginning of a multitude of changes to come.

Why do we think Digg has made these changes?

The web is moving fast and has evolved considerably within the last year. To keep up with this, Digg saw the need to change their vision and direction to keep up with the needs of its users.

Rose mentioned in an interview:

“We’re making some drastic changes, but they’re much-needed drastic changes,” he told The Telegraph. “People are going to be shocked at some of the directions we’re taking.”

Ultimately this was to embrace real-time web, as most Digg users will be familiar with the style of Twitter and Facebook (already well received).

Conclusion

With this new look and the move towards a more social feel, similar to Twitter, it seems that Digg is doing what a lot of other sites are doing and trying to get a piece of the social media market. Many sites seem to be copying the facilities of other already successful sites in the social media arena. This is not a new philosophy in the world of the Internet. There are other examples that I will delve into below:

Google

Google has, over the last month, spent something in the region of $200 million on companies that have brought us the best social network games out there. These purchases however are not in a bid to bring you something that is new-fangled, but instead to provide something that brings friends and social networks together. For me this is exactly what Facebook do now, but Google are keeping their cards very close to their chest about the new Google ME Social network.

Facebook

Facebook has only recently released a new feature for its already vast empire. This feature lets you tell friends where you are by signing in to a location on your phone. Basically, if you went to say Starbucks in Manchester then you can use your phone to announce that you are there and then all your friends will know where you are and they can meet you if they are nearby. This new feature is going to be called ‘Places’.

Funny thing is that this has already been done before and if I am not mistaken is very successful. The company who already do this is called FourSquare. They already perform this social media feature very well and over 4 million people use FourSquare worldwide.

Overall

Using social tools like this can be a brilliant way to enhance and promote your website to others. If you look at all the big brands, they will always have a social media aspect to their internet marketing, as it helps to generate more traffic to a site.

Authors: Gemma Neesham, Ahmed Bhula and David Stopher.

When you are sat at the bottom end of the top 10 results for your keyword it can be difficult to know what to do next in terms of links in order to climb any higher. One way in which you can gain an insight into your competitors’ links and compare yourself against them is to undertake link analysis.

This can be done using a backlink analysis tool such as Open site explorer (http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/),  and it’s as easy as entering the domain name of your site and exporting the backlink results into an Excel spreadsheet.

Most of these analysis tools will not only return the URLs of the backlinks but also their page authority. Once you have the results for your own site you can then do the same for the sites ranking in the top 5.

Once you have all the data in one spreadsheet table it is easy to pivot the results and determine how many backlinks each site has, with particular page authority. This will then allow you to see if you need to concentrate on getting links with high authority or if the majority of your competition has low level authority links, letting you know that this is an area you need to work on.

The best way to show the results that can be achieved from this type of analysis is to use a case study:

We have taken a keyword and completed a links analysis based on it. Firstly we needed to get the data from our example site which is currently ranking in position 7 for the keyword being analysed.

Next we analysed the sites ranking in the top 3 positions for the same keyword. We used Open Site ExpIorer to collect our data and from there we were able to export the results into an Excel spreadsheet. Once in Excel, we then pivoted the data based on the number of links each site had of a particular page authority. This data was then displayed in a graph to better compare the differences in links between all four sites being analysed.

The example below shows a comparison between the numbers of links belonging to a particular page authority.

As you can see from the graph above, positions 1, 2 and 3 all have a high number of links with a page authority between 9 and 21. Therefore, in order for our site at position 7 to compete, it will need more links with page authority in this area.

With the results obtained, we were able to create another graph showing the average number of links and page authority of the top 3 ranking sites only. This gives us a target for the number and type of links we need to acquire.

Lastly, the graph above shows a domain authority comparison between the links on the four sites rather than page authority. This is also something that needs to be taken into consideration when link building.

It is clearly visible that our site at position 7 needs to gain a high number of links with domain authorities between 5 and 6.

The information gained from this analysis is very useful and gives site owners a better idea of what links they need to acquire in order to get the rankings they desire.

Authors: Gemma Neesham and Dave Stopher.