The social aggregation service Digg got two changes Tuesday that could make the jobs of Web site marketers better.
First, the company is tweaking its submitted story duplicate checker. As before, Digg blocks re-submissions of the exact same URL within a 30-day window. Now it's also got improved algorithms to identify when a duplicate story is submitted, even if it has a different URL. Furthermore, stories on completely different sites that are the same "or similar" now get flagged as potential duplicates.
Digg has been improving duplicate detection for months, and it's important work. Stories flagged separately on Digg that are actually the same can suffer diluted community impact, lower Digg counts overall, and give those stories less exposure than they deserve. Collecting all the appropriate Diggs under a canonical entry helps the good stories surface.
Speaking of surfacing stories, Digg now has a site search option in its search engine. If you want to see what Diggs your site is generating, just search for the site with a query structure you're already used to from Google: "site:sitename.com." You can sort the results by recency to see the latest Digg activity your site is generating. You can also get these results in an RSS feed, which is a very useful way to monitor what's happening on sites you care about.
If you're responsible for keeping a site in the public eye, these two improvements will make that easier, and easier to track.
This article was first published as a blog post on CNET News.
Play video
There are currently no comments for this post.