Secrets of Going Popular Twice on Digg

In a thread today at SEO Refugee, Yuri asked about stories getting submitted more than once to Digg. The question is what happens if the same URL is submitted more than once? Will the submissions get buried? Social Alerter's data can help us in answering this question.

There is a lot of ground to cover here so buckle up - it's a long post.

The Data Set

Social Alerter tracks only stories that got any traction on Digg (i.e. stories with more than a handful of diggs); the number of stories is currently about 41000 stories. Of those, about 5700 went popular. They are two data sets that overlap - the popular stories are also wholly included in the 41000 story data set.

Multiple Submissions

So, how many stories got submitted more than once?

Of the 5700 popular stories, 10 submissions were 5 stories each submitted twice. These 10 submissions/5 stories are detailed below. So yes, the same story can go popular more than once on Digg.

Of the complete data set of stories (the one with 41000 stories), 206 stories (unique URLs) were submitted more than once. Some stats:

• The most number of submissions was 5 times for an the score of the NY Giants vs New England Patriots game from ESPN. I'm not a fan of American Football and even I knew about the game, so it's not surprising it got submitted so many times.
• Two stories got submitted four times: Mashable's coverage of a Digg revolt.
• Six stories got submitted three times.
• The rest (197 stories) got submitted twice.

Multiple Submissions = Popular?

Of the 206 stories that were submitted more than once, how many actually became popular? The answer is 62 stories, and the rest (144 stories) did not become popular at all. The upshot of this result is that multiple submissions are more likely to get buried that get promoted.

Final Remarks

Before getting lost in the data for those 5 stories let's think about this a bit more: By far, most stories get submitted only once, and those that do get any traction tend to not go popular.

Stories that Popped More than Once

Now let us look in detail at those 5 stories that went popular twice each. The format of the info below is the same for each story as it was a script that extracted the data.

Without further ado...

This story from abcnews.go.com was submitted 2 times.

The story has no known buries.

This story from torrentfreak.com was submitted 2 times.

This story from www.msnbc.msn.com was submitted 2 times.

The story has no known buries.

The story has no known buries.

This story from www.politico.com was submitted 2 times.

The story has no known buries.

This story from www.tmz.com was submitted 2 times.

The story has no known buries.

Questions, comments, feedback at the usual place.