Digg is a sweet target for automated SEO tools because they have a powerful API, plenty of horsepower, and you can get a lot of ROI from even a little advantage. But you have to build it right or you’ll consume all your own bandwidth/CPU and produce a tool that is down a lot. And no matter how free something is, it’s not very useful if it doesn’t stay up and produce results.

The Obvious Way

Well, it’s usually wrong, or at the very best it’s what everyone else is doing, so there is no advantage gained. So if you were building a tool to mine digg for information you’d:

Easily Banned

We would never do anything black hat (we just look like the jelly beans nobody wants when we dress as Men In Black) but it’s pretty easy to imagine that with a server based architecture Digg would choose to ban our service or choke our bandwidth rather than change their TOS so we’d stop:

How To Build it Unstoppable

Once again, you download a small AJAX application which hits the Digg API from your local machine.

This conserves our bandwidth, CPU, and (most importantly) makes the overall application run faster and be unbannable.

What if Digg Hits Me Like You Worry They’ll Hit You?

Reasonable enough. But let’s take a look at why they’d hit us….

If five hundred people show up and each of them causes a thousand queries to the Digg API, well, you don’t even have to do the math to figure out that 500K hits on the API from one IP address, well, that is going to attract attention.

But everything we’re going to do is within the TOS of Digg, uses their API in a reasonable way, and can be used in a white-hat manner. So if the service runs from your computer then what Digg sees is five hundred new people using the API in an appropriate fashion. Their response to this sort of use is much more likely to be throwing some more hardware at the gateway.

Also, worst case, if you trip some sort of capacity limit and they slow you down, well, you're on a dynamic IP and our server ain't....

What Happens if Digg Changes their TOS

We’d change the service to stay inside the rules. If that were not possible, we’d pull it down. We’re a business and we have to co-exist within a framework of contracts and rules.

You HATE Free Stuff – Why Are You Doing This?

Well, we actually love “free” stuff that works, it’s the undependable and almost not-working free stuff that drives us nuts. But this is not a free service, we get several items of value:

• Advertising on the ‘free’ pages
• Name recognition for future, fee based services

How much does it cost to capture a customer? It can cost a lot and we do this sort of utility because we believe that this is the most cost efficient way to get paying customers. By paying we mean that people are either clicking ads or they are migrating to paid services.

What if People Abuse It?

Jeeze, you don’t even know what it does yet and you’re worried about abuse?Well, you’re in good company, we worry too. But we are assuming that people using the site are adults, with good judgment and respect for their internet environment. If that is a bad assumption then we’ll regroup and start putting controls in place.

Coming soon……

We’re pretty excited about this tool and we think you will be too.