How To Not Get Dugg

Updated 29 Feb 2008. See at end. Please subscribe to the RSS feed for constant updates.

There are many reasons to want your site going popular on Digg. There are also many reasons you don't want that to happen. For example, you may be crafting your latest linkbait masterpiece and would like to ensure it gets submitted "properly" using a great title and description.

So what we need is a way to guarantee no one is able to submit pages from your website to Digg. And there is a way...

The trick here is to realize that Digg checks every URL when it is submitted. Looking through the log files, when a submission is attempted, you get a request like this one:

Now we know what to do: block that IP address (64.191.203.34) from accessing the site. While we're at it, we should just block Digg's whole IP C-block to ensure against Digg changing their crawler's IP address in the future. Note that this tip will be constantly updated as and when I discover that the IP address has changed.

How do we block the IP address? Many ways. The simplest is by using .htaccess. Just add the following to your site's .htaccess file and you're done:

Of course, you can do it in PHP, ASP, or whatever language you prefer. Some content management systems, like Drupal, even allow you to deny access by IP address.

Whatever method you choose, test it works by attempting to submit a URL from your site to Digg. It should fail saying that there is something wrong with that URL.

Update 29 February 2008: The user agent of the Digg crawler has changed; the IP address is still the same. The full new request details are: