Boo.com gaming Digg?

There was a bit of press earlier in the week regarding the relaunch of Boo.com - this time as a travel website. A number of blogs picked up on the story - I even wrote something - but focussed on the history of Boo - rather than its future. (see my previous post). For what its worth - I quite like the new site (with new owners). It is a competitive sector they are moving in to - but they know that. They look like they are preparing themselves for their battles ahead.

Now why am I writing about Boo for a 2nd time in a week? I have a live website visitor statistics package on my desktop - so I get a picture as to what is going on with a website in real time (more about this in the future).

Lo and behold - somehow my previous blog post about Boo ended up on Digg - not only that - but on the Upcoming section (http://www.digg.com/news/upcoming). Within 3 minutes of the post being listed on that page - I think about 15 site visitors had come from Digg and landed on post on this website. This just shows how powerful Digg is in driving traffic and why it may be worth trying to optimise - or “game” - for commercial benefit.

Here is what it looked like on Digg…..

For those of you unfamiliar with digg - a story has a headline - and a mini review - and they are all user submitted. As you can see from this review, it hardly relates to the original post on this blog…. but there you are. No wonder it very very quickly went from the first page on digg to a deep page (and no more visitors came)

So how did it get onto Digg in the first place? Ah - a mystery!

Nope…. here is a screenshot from my live stats package….

Can you see what I see?

Yep - the first visitor - at 16:51 - is from duboffice.webresint.com - that would be, in my opinion, the Dublin office from Web Reservations International - who are the owners of Boo.com! As you can see, the stream of Digg visitors to this page started about 2 minutes later….

How can I be sure that this is right? Lets look and see who did the first “Digg”. Looks like a user called emmetmartin (who only created a new Digg profile today). This is the Digg profile screen:

I am amazed that a new member can get a post to the upcoming section…. perhaps it was just luck - I don’t know.  

Who did this? Here is Emmet’s Boo.com profile and his listing on the Boo staff page

Why did they do this? This is just an extension of search engine optimisation - so OK in my book (when done in moderation). Good job Emmet.

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