# a blog about things that I've been thinking hard about

# How to Get Your Article Onto The Digg Front Page, Twice

23 October, 2006
It's good if you can get a lot of traffic to your website because one of your articles appears on the front page of Digg. It can be even better when an article makes it to the front page twice. Read this article to find out the four steps to follow if you want your article to appear on the front page of Digg twice.
by Philip Dorrell

## What Happened

Can it be done? Can you write an article and get it onto the front page of Digg, not once but twice?

I didn't think so. When I saw that How to Do Cube Roots of 9 Digit Numbers in Your Head was getting heavily bookmarked in Delicious about a week ago, I wondered what had triggered so much interest in my article. Could it be that there was a self-sustaining traffic spike from Delicious itself? If not, where was the traffic coming from?

I knew that the traffic wasn't coming from Digg, because the article had previously made it to the front page, in fact it was my first Digg success, and until somewhat recently, my only Digg success.

But I was wrong. The traffic was coming from Digg. It was coming from this second submission. How could this be?

It turned out that Digg user Salviati had submitted my article to Digg. But why was Salviati's submission not rejected as a duplicate? Why didn't the submission get converted into a vote for the existing article?

The answer came when I looked at the submission dates of the two stories. The more recent submission by Salviati happened on 16 October 2006. The older submission (by myself, how lame can you get?) happened on 16 October 2005. It seems that, after a year, or more precisely, 365 days, Digg "forgets" about an existing submission and lets you submit exactly the same article a second time.

Why would they do this? Is it some kind of mistake? There may be an official explanation, but I'll give you my own guess – the Digg folks figure that if an existing article is still interesting a year later, then let it be submitted again, because probably there are new users who haven't seen it before. Why 365 days? Well, if you let re-submissions happen too soon, everyone will get bored and annoyed by all the duplicate stories. But most stories have ceased to be topical after a year has expired, so that's a reasonable interval to allow after which an article can be resubmitted.

## Instructions on How to Get Your Article Onto the Front Page Twice

Based on my experience with the "Cube Roots" article, I can suggest the following steps which you can follow to get your article onto the Digg front page twice:

Step One: Get the Article Onto The Front Page Once
  This is probably the hardest part. (After all, I've only ever had two stories of mine get onto the front page, so what would I know about getting Dugg?) Public taste is fickle. The surfing public seeks novelty, credibility and ease of consumption all at once. Stories that die or fizzle on one social bookmarking site can succeed on another. If you are obsessed with web popularity, and you want to get there just by writing stuff, the best advice I can give is to write about any interesting idea that enters your head.
Step Two: Make Sure Your Article Is "Timeless"
  Of course really this step has to come before the first step. And the article doesn't have to be infinitely timeless – it just has to be timeless enough to be interesting a year later.
Step Three: Wait 365 Days
  Get on with your life. Do other things. Write other articles, and if you like, submit them to Digg. Or just hide in a cave for a year.
Step Four: Submit the Article Again
  You don't even have to do this yourself. It helps if you put a "vote for this article" link at the bottom, because then anyone who clicks on the link a year later will find themselves making a new submission.

## Pictures

Unfortunately, due to having switched web providers, I don't have a continuous traffic graph for the last year. However, you can see an indication of my traffic history on this Alexa "reach" graph of the last 18 months (opens in new page). The spike in October 2005 is from the first time the "Cube Roots" article hit the Digg front page, and the large spike in late October 2006 is from the same article hitting the front page the second time. The smaller spike earlier in October 2006 is from the "DSL Metaprogramming" article hitting the Digg front page, and most of the other visible spikes are from either Reddit or StumbleUpon.

## The Future

The future looks bright. The possibilities are endless. Who knows what ideas may enter my head to be written up as articles that explode across the Internet? Then again, perhaps my future writing efforts are forever doomed to be overshadowed by an article about a mental arithmetic trick based on elementary number theory.

And, in another year's time, if the Digg resubmission policy hasn't changed, maybe my article will hit the front page again. Then I can write an article about how to get the same article onto Digg's front page three times.

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