Top websites ranked by Digg saturation

Tracking the number of times a particular blog hits the Digg homepage isn’t really a great indicator of popularity. Some Digg stories get a couple of hundred Diggs while others are far more popular and attract several thousand.

Luckily Google offers a simple way to measure the overall popularity of a site with the Digg audience by making use of its site: command. This tracks all mentions of a site including when people link to you in the comments section.

Looking at the results for BlogStorm we can see that my site has a Digg saturation of just under 3,000 meaning that the phrase blogstorm.co.uk is mentioned 3000 times on the Digg website.

Digg Saturation

“Why does this matter?” I hear you ask. Well, looking at the number of links to a site from Digg is an easy way for Google to see what sites should be ranking and which are spam. Its easy to get one low quality story to the Digg front page but to fake a Digg saturation figure of well into the thousands is totally impossible.

The Top sites by Digg Saturation

Some of you might be thinking that due to the way the Digg archives work this list will favour sites that have been on the Digg homepage recently. This is clearly the case but if I was Google I would want to rank sites that are popular now rather than sites that were popular a few months ago. Perhaps thats why hitting the front page of social media sites gives an immediate boost in search engine rankings.

Whats your Digg saturation? If it’s more than Matt Cutts on 851 add a comment below and I’ll update the list.

BY Patrick Altoft AT 11:25am ON Wednesday, 3 October 2007

Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3 and has worked in the SEO industry for over 10 years. With experience across some of the worlds largest brands as well as startup businesses Patrick is well known in the industry and speaks regularly at the major SEO conferences and events. Follow Patrick on Twitter or Google+

Comments

http://pickthebrain.com John Wesley

Interesting post. I just checked my site. PickTheBrain is at 2,870.
http://techvat.com Steve D

your list is sorely lacking. Kotaku.com has 33,300 results and is not on your list.
http://adityaspeaks.com Aditya Kumar Singh

Nice way to measure digg success. I never thought of this.
http://simplehelp.net Ross

My site, simplehelp.net, has 2,800.
http://micahville.com Micahville

My site, micahville.com, has 1,020..
Ray Wert

Jalopnik – 17,400
http://ohgizmo.com david ponce

Mine, ohgizmo.com, is at 5,060.

That should put me at #32…
http://onmylist.com/members/noah Noah

I hope to get us up there soon. We’re close with 675. OnMyList, The only place to list your pants off.
http://profit42.com Jan

My site, profit42.com has a digg saturation of 1910, would be great if you added it to the list.
http://imagechan.org heffo

imagechan has 2,210
Also an image from it is the 35th most dugg article ever
http://many British Dude

Here’s a few:

timesonline.co.uk
dailymail.co.uk

I could go on all day.
Darg

Wired has 43,300
http://designvitality.com/blog Mustafa

My site has seen the Digg affect quite a bit. According to Google my site, DesignVitality.com, has 2,160 which puts me higher than Matt Cutts and quite a few more on your list.
http://inhabitat.com User

Inhabitat has 5,460.
Me

John,

I bet if you were to hit ctrl-f and type ‘Kotaku.com’ you would find it nestled just below treehugger and just above macrumors at number 13 on the list with 33,500
http://chrispyx.com Chris Pereira

Just checked two that should have hit the list:

FileFront.com – 10,200
GamerNode.com – 7,800
http://whenpenguinsattack.com Justin Silverton

mine has 1360, whenpenguinsattack.com
Nick

racketboy.com has 1,800
Destructoid has 27,200
http://thoughtstowords.com Karthick R

http://www.microsoft.com, 20,500 .

Somehow not in the list ;-)
http://maddox.xmission.com maddox

Way to miss Maddox, his articles regularly make it to the front page of digg, and his iPhone one alone has over 14,000 diggs (posted about a month ago).
http://dailygaming.net Andrew

Dailygaming.net has around 1100. It’d be at the very bottom, but it’s still there.
http://gameriot.com Brad Dickason

Hey we beat Matt Cutts! I work for Gameriot.com 1,420.
http://blogstorm.co.uk Patrick Altoft

Maddox doesn’t have enough saturation for the list.
more and more

myspace.com
facebook.com
break.com
wikipedia.org
msn.com

just read alexa.com if you want to have a comprehensive list.
Dan Russell

Cracked?

XKCD?

Surely these belong.
http://dailywtf.net Naresh

http://www.tumbl.us has a saturation 4,520
Daniel

Uh, MSN.com has almost 60,000. What’s the point of this unless you input every website on the internet. Your list only contains the sites that came to your mind while making it.
http://blogstorm.co.uk Patrick Altoft

Daniel, I see MSN.com at 36,400. Maybe you are hitting a different Google datacenter or something.

If you want to suggest some sites that are missing please feel free. I made the list based on my own knowledge as a long term Digg user and by looking at the Technorati top blogs.
http://wowinsider.com Eliah

WoW Insider, 1130.
http://paulstamatiou.com Paul Stamatiou

670 + 342 (I have a domain alias that ppl submit as well)
paulstamatiou.com + pstam.com

so I guess you could say my saturation is 1012
http://970.am no

Who cares about Digg? A bunch of navel-gazing douches.
http://menshealth.com seth

http://menshealth.com has 8,730
http://wikihow.com Jack H

Cool list! You missed wikiHow, which would have been #37 on the list with 11,300.
http://searchengineland.com Danny Sullivan

It’s a nice idea, but you’re not measuring it correctly. Right now, you’re simply searching for any pages that Digg that have the domains as words on the pages, not as links. I mean, look at [site:digg.com yahoo.com]. That’s bringing up pages where people are putting in yahoo.com email addresses, among other things. Plus, in other cases, you’re getting pages that have links from profiles rather than stories.

A better way would be to do something like this.

OK, that’s searching Digg itself for all stories to the youtube.com URL. Look at the bottom, and you’ll see there are around 1525 pages of results, 10 stories per page, so a saturation of 15,250 stories. Tick the buried option if you want to get more accurate. Even better, you might scrap and total the raw number of Diggs earned for all stories. Now that would be a metric — which site has the most cumulative Diggs over time.
LizardDude

littlegreenfootballs.com has 10,100
http://getrichslowly.org/blog/ J.D. Roth

My site is Get Rich Slowly, and it has a saturation of 3,800!
JON

techdirt.com 10,600
http://joshmullineaux.com Josh Mullineaux

Check out natewhitehill.com He’ll soon pass up John Chow and Pro Blogger no problem. He own’s blogdesign.com which is taking off. Profits up over 1000% in first month!!
http://Crooksandliars.com John

I thought my site got a lot of Diggs, but that’s wild… # 12
http://vr6tech.com Craig

Wow, this is a very different concept. I never thought to check for Digg links to see if a site is spam or not. Great article.
http://blogstorm.co.uk Patrick Altoft

Danny, I agree that posting Yahoo email addresses will skew the data but I was trying to measure the popularity of a domain by seeing how many times it was mentioned on Digg, not just how many times it was Dugg. The two are not going to produce the same results.

Also I wanted to bring up results that would be very easy for Google to incorporate into the algorithm, totalling the raw number of Diggs wouldn’t be as easy.

Finally there are some sites that are always Dugg by the same group of people which would mean less Digg saturation using my method. Sites that have Diggs from a wide range of people would appear in more categories and in more peoples profiles and therefore should be thought of as more popular.
http://blogstorm.co.uk Patrick Altoft

Josh, Nate might be great at designing blogs but his Digg saturation is only 185 so he doesn’t make the list.
http://ririanproject.com Ririan

Nice concept, my blog ririanproject.com has 2280.
http://BBspot Brian

BBspot.com has 5,710.
http://subcorpus.net/blog/ subcorpus

i cant find mine anywhere …
guess i need to work on it better …
spend some time informing people of my blog …
hehe …
http://blogs.msdn.com/andyed/archive/2006/10/17/search-macros-recap.aspx Andyed

You use to be able to do this with MSN Search using linkfromdomain… alas they shut it down due to spammers (and broke a lot of end user efforts, very lame). Read more at http://blogs.msdn.com/andyed/archive/2006/10/17/search-macros-recap.aspx
http://linuxtracker.org mcangeli

linuxtracker.org has 2070.
http://racketboy.com racketboy

mine has 1,800
racketboy.com
http://blog.yuvisense.net Yuvi

Hi Patrick! Thanks for this, but I’d like to address one thing:
>>totalling the raw number of Diggs wouldn’t be as easy.

Well, here it is for you! Top 100 Sites on Digg.com ordered by the Nett No. of Diggs. Hope you find it useful…
David

Phoronix.com has 5,390 in Google at Digg.
http://gabbr.com Maxivida

My best friend’s dog’s uncle’s sister-in-law’s horses’ barn manager’s site has 324234 links: http://www.gabbr.com
http://searchengines.wordpress.com/ Search Engines WEB

Techcrunch has this story as
who spams digg the most

some of those on this list are very ethical and would never be likely to spam
Falko

HowtoForge has 7,520.
http://itsecurity.com Owen

itsecurity.com at 1250
http://hem.com.np Hem

mine is at 487 link
http://aa11.tripod.com/gold/ Hollywood

It would be interesting to compare rankings for submissions to homepages
http://photoshopsupport.com/ Jennifer Apple

Adobe has 6,400.
http://ecogeek.org Billy Shih

EcoGeek.org has 8,320
http://viperchill.com/blog/ Glen Allsopp

Great post idea with some interesting stats, good work.
http://pfadvice.com pfadvice

interesting way of looking at things – my site pfadvice.com comes in a 1,140
http://onemansblog.com John Pozadzides

Great little article. I found it very amusing.

I checked, and it looks like One Man’s Blog is currently sitting at 1,930.

I had to check it like 3 times because I couldn’t believe it… but it’s there.

Incidentally, I’ve got a way you can embed this search in your page, so drop me an e-mail and I’ll share it with you. I’m going to link to your post including an embedded search in OMB tomorrow morning.

Take care, and thanks for the amusement.

John P.
http://symbiancorner.blogspot.com Symbian

Interesting post, these stats are really useful.
http://netpaths.net/seo CVOS man

Interesting, your numbers are about 20% lower than I am seeing. A few examples:
engadget 355,000
wikipedia 126,000
macrumors 34,900

Perhaps the difference is I am querying google US
http://webhostingreality.blogspot.com Top Webhost

I discovered websites with more relevant and helpful contents than those that hit on the front page of Digg, but these sites are never noticed because they don’t belong to the culture of Digg and the West, perhaps.
http://www.pimpology.co.uk Dan

I love this little article, nice idea and great job on gathering the statistics..
Yuvi has a nice example too in his site above :D
Pingback: What Is LinkBait? | Domain Name News | Domain News | Expired Domains
Pingback: Ultimate Digg Resource
http://www.mecozz.com mecozz

mecozz.com is at 509,112
Pingback: Using Social Media to advertise your site. | PureBlogging
http://www.all-most.com Adam

I love the list, Digg is a great site and everyone should be using it. I hope I can get my Digg numbers up before everyone else gets too far ahead of me.
http://fotos.xo.cr FotosCR

very interesting information!
http://arolemodel.com/ PaulH82

Oh cool, pick the brain. Great site :)

Top websites ranked by Digg saturation

The Top sites by Digg Saturation

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