14 DAY TRIAL // Although it might sound a little bit shocking, it can be true: Digg blocks certain stories from reaching the homepage straight from their servers. The reason? Unknown. But the guys from Pronet Advertising tried to show us that a certain story cannot be published on the first page because it is buried from the Digg servers. First of all, they tried to prove this manually by creating a story to be posted on Digg and see if it manages to reach the first page. After the article received more than 20 digs, it was buried by the Digg employees and not by the users of the service. "You probably think users buried the story, but it actually was one of the Digg employees who buried it or an algorithm that is targeting specific content topics/sites," Pronet Advertising said.
They went even further and tried to prove that the site automatically blocks some stories by directly using the Digg's weapons. Pronet Advertisiing found a document published on Digg that reveals the latest buried Digg articles. As you can see, there are no more than 10.000 blocked stories, some of them with a considerable number of diggs. The guys from Pronet Advertising also published a picture that shows Digg really buried an article, because the last referrer for a certain story before it was blocked was crawl3.digg.internet.
Now, you might be outraged, but some of the users find Digg as the most important way to drive traffic to their pages. Usually, when a certain story is buried, most of the publishers blame it on the content, the title or even on the website that hosts the story. This time, the story is a little bit different so, if you want to find out more information, you should read the entire article published by Pronet Advertising.