Should Digg Results Outrank Original Content?

[Jason]

Jane Copland at SEOmoz doesn’t like seeing Diggs in the SERPs. I’m actually of two minds on this one.

On the one hand, I can see her point. If I, as a searcher, find information that has been Dugg then I have to click on the Digg page in the SERP then click on the source link in Digg to get to the original source. It’s two steps. On the other hand, my experience has been that those Digg results are for Diggs that are popular and not just Dugg once or twice. That means that either they are older Diggs or recent Diggs that are very popular. If they are older and just hanging around then I don’t want to see them because they likely are not relevant, or at least not recent enough to be good sources of information. On the other hand, if it is a recent Digg that is very popular then I could be finding information that is a good source of information that I likely would not find otherwise because the original source was not SEOd well.

OK, so there are two hands of the first hand. Now there are two hands of the second hand, which makes for four hands.

Second hand: From an SEO perspective, I’d like to see my original page ranking above Digg. Who wouldn’t? I worked hard to SEO it and now I’ve got an aggregated source beating me in the rankings for my own content. That’s not good. On the other hand (Hand No. 4), this could be telling me that I didn’t do a good enough job SEOing my content. I really should take another look at it and see if I can improve the SEO of the original content. But then (Hand No. 5?), maybe the search engines do need to tweak their algorithms. If Digg outranking a lot of sites for useful content then maybe the algorithms are weighted toward age factors and authority sites too much. If that is the case then Jane’s argument of canonical sources vs. aggregators is right on.

OK, now how many fingers am I holding behind my back (on all hands).

Nick Stamoulis