For last few months one question has been bugging me, how Digging any items affects the search results. The doubt came when I first started using Digg, I submitted one URL from my blog to see if I get some more traffic. And in two days I realized THE link was appearing in top 10 results on Google when search key words were same as my Digg story. I tried to analyze more but could not get proper statistics.
I tried to experiment again, this time I used our F1 blog as crawling rate is set to average ( once in fortnight), I used ‘Force India Formula1 Logo’ that I captured from TV and posted on the blog. At the same time I submitted the story to Digg. In just nine hours I got more than 60 hits (unusual for that blog) and it was the top result on Google. According to my calculation, it would take at least 7 more days to for Google to crawl the latest content, then how was out post on the top?
I agree it was latest (but not sensational as compared to rest of F1 info) information, but still I never got that kind of response before. I searched for more such information and found few useful links:
Social Media’s Direct Influence on Search Engine Ranking, provides the info and patents taken by Google/Yahoo in utilizing the power of social bookmarking for better results.
The Digg effect, web2.0 search engine optimization, performs one experiment and proves how search results can be influenced.
I want to get some more statistics by doing some experiment, since we have search, bookmarking and blogs in place, we can easily get the information. I don’t know about nutch how much information it provides, algorithms are optimized for SEOs or not. So we can do our experiment online too. We publish one story (fairly interesting) to a new blog, Digg it, reddit, put it on Del.icio.us , Ma.gnolia and see how easy/hard is it to make a “normal” story popular.
Anyone interested?
Update: Just found out someone submitted it to humsurfer too. Don’t know anything about humsurfer, and Google will crawl it or not 
