There was a time in our history when a website owner’s worst fear was a DDOS attack on their servers. Five years into the future, today, many of us mistake DDOS for Disk Operating System (or even worse, Command Prompt). In this age of web 2.0, servers are posed by even greater threat; that of 20, 000 + hits per day by unique visitors. The term “dugg” comes to mind when one thinks of these crashed websites. If you haven’t guessed it already, which I am sure you have but I will mention it anyway, I am talking about Digg.com.
Websites appearing on the front page of digg.com experience thousands of hits in a very short interval of time, often so many that websites temporarily become inaccessible or annoyingly slow. This phenomenon has come to be known as the “Digg effect”.
That is all good and dandy, but have you ever wondered how Digg.com affects a website's Google PageRank? After all, when the Digg effect has subsided, it is the site's search engine listing that actually makes a difference in the long term. While there are many that have analyzed Digg's effect on web traffic, no one has yet, to my knowledge, investigated Digg's effect on a website's actual PageRank. So out of curiosity, I registered this domain name with an initial PageRank of zero. The purpose of this experiment is to determine how the PageRank increases relative to the number of Diggs it receives.
Website traffic alone does not increase the PageRank, in fact it is commonly believed that it has no affect on it at all. The PageRank of a website is determined by inbound links rather than website traffic. However, the accumulated affect that Digg brings to websites through external sources linking (i.e. del.icio.us) to the digged story should substantially increase the PageRank. To carry out this experiment, I have made the subdomain digg.shuzak.com available for linking. The increase in PageRank will be available to everyone who visits this page.
As of July 03, 2006 the PageRank of this page is zero. Watch it grow as it is dugg:
*Note: PageRank updates only when Google re indexes the website on its servers; therefore, it might take a few days (or even weeks) to witness a considerable change.
This experiment will be a model for estimating the rise in a website's PageRank whenever it is Dugg up to Digg.com's frontpage.