• CNET News.com, Monday, December 4, 2006 11 AM

Digg, the community-voting site that is suppose to help the Web's best articles rise to the surface, is coming under fire as companies and communities of users with a vested interest in working together are trying to manipulate the site's rankings.

It's similar to click fraud, but rather than using an automated program run by a sketchy third party, this kind is committed with the direct participation of users. Users say the manipulation is eroding Digg's credibility.

The site's executives have owned up to the problem. "People are trying to basically take advantage of Digg by artificially promoting a story with fake diggers or some other methodology of link swapping," Digg Chief Executive Jay Adelson said.Digg's egalitarian approach to editorial natural selection has caused many online publications, from blogs to news sites, to add "Digg" buttons to stories, so readers can easily recommend them.

It's not really surprising that marketers, PR firms and spammers are trying to take advantage of this. The more "diggs," the more publicity, the more links, the higher the search ranking. There are even so-called "content generation services" dedicated to selling stories to Web sites for the sole purpose of getting sites like Digg, Del.icio.us and Reddit to link to them. These aggregators now face a huge threat to their business model; it'll be interesting to see how these communities react.

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