Digg Effect Traffic Come Back Survival

A gift that at the same time was a curse, the Digg effect took us down back on September 11, 2007 - ironic date I know. However, we did survive and we are in the process of improving the blog and posting articles that were missed during the month of October. Thanks to Girls Of The Israeli Army post done back on August 5, 2007 we got well over 2000 Diggs before our MySQL database could take no more connections.

For those of you who do not know Digg, it is best to just head on over to the community to sign up and start clicking around. Start viewing the Digg review of our page that created a lot of traffic for us and then begin exploring Digg. It is somewhat of an easy concept to grasp but here is what the ol’ mighty internet resource has to say about it:

A community-based popularity website with an emphasis on technology and science articles, recently expanding to a broader range of categories such as politics and entertainment. It combines social bookmarking, blogging, and syndication with a form of non-hierarchical, democratic editorial control

According to Wikipedia. Basically that all means that the readers vote - “Digg” - webpages, blogs, photos etc. that they like. The more Diggs you get the higher your ranking in the community. Voters do not all carry the same vote. People who are reputable and have the most friends get more say and weight. This helps when an average Joe trys to cheat and vote his webpage up.

I like the concept and I see this as being the way of the future since Google offers sites that can pay the most the top ranking and old sites that use old html tricks. Flash sites and other sites that are much better and more relevant do not show up first on Google. Digg allows you to search based on similar interest and popularity. I love the concept so much and sites like Digg I use more often than Google. I only use Google to check on my SEO and ranking since most users are using Google.

The only thing I like dislike about Digg is general community. Most are liberal lefties so 99.9% of the articles that are most popular are related to Global Warming, bashing Bush and America, Hippie, Vegetarianism, and on down the list. It works for them though and those who enjoy that fashion. StumbleUpon is a little better since you can associate with friends and network inside the community that have similar interests.

The Digg Effect is when you reach the homepage of Digg and you are bombarded with a drastic increase in traffic since your site is now rank as a must see to a very large community of internet users. We generated over 20,000 visits in a matter of a couple of hours! It would have been more, but unfortunately we were not prepared.

Here are some tips we learned after it was too late:

• Get good hosting
• Optimize your page
• Accelerate PHP
• Cache Pages
• Host Large Assets on Another Server
• Redirect to a Mirror
• Configure Your Server