The Secret List of Sites Banned by Digg
Update
Nearly everyone of these sites has been unbanned. There are only 6 sites on this list that remain banned.
neogaf.com
thevideosense.com
blinklist.com
geocities.com
digg.com
idontlikeyouinthatway.com
The first 4 sites were the ‘temporary ban’ type. Digg is digg and will likely remain banned. In fact, idontlikeyouinthatway is the only site from the original list that was permanently banned. It would seem likely that all the permanent bans were lifted (but not the temporary ones), and that the idontlikeyouinthatway was rebanned (or maybe it was extra banned to begin with)…
Original Post:
Ever wonder which sites are banned by Digg? Who would have thought that 3 of the top 10 Alexa sites and sites like CareerBuilder, DHL and 43Things would be banned? To develop as complete a list as possible, I tested the top 10,000 Alexa domains and top 1,000 Blogshares blogs to see which were banned. Overall, I found 183 banned sites.
The banned sites fell into several categories:
- User Generated Content sites without subdomains. One bad actor on these sites can ruin it for everyone.
Popular UGC sites like Myspace, Squidoo, 43Things, Geocities are all banned, whereas sites like Typepad, Blogspot, WordPress do just fine because it is easy to ban one bad actor. If I were Seth Godin, I’d give Squidoo lenses their own subdomains pronto - there is good content on Squidoo that will never see the light of Digg. - Sites about SEO & Affiliate Marketing. These include TopRankBlog, DigitalPoint, Revenews, John Chow, Paula Mooney, etc. There is some great content that’s been banned … and plenty of poor content as well (theRichJerk).
- International Sites, particularly Asian sites (Baidu, Sohu, Sina, Yandex, etc.). I can’t speak to the quality of these sites, but four of them are in Alexa’s top 20 and others are very popular. Digg and Digg users would certainly benefit from international versions of its site. (Hint, follow the Google model, not the Yahoo model).
- Scummy sites. There are plenty of sites here that I’m not surprised to find banned. Gossip Sites (perezhilton), Adult-themed sites (pornotube), adware/spyware sites (smileycentral), etc.
I’m sure that plenty of sites were banned due to attempts at gaming Digg, but I obviously can’t distinguish those from the sites on the list above.
The big list of banned domains:
Domain (Alexa)
baidu.com (4)
myspace.com (6)
sina.com.cn (10)
sohu.com (16)
163.com (17)
rapidshare.com (26)
wretch.cc (32)
yandex.ru (43)
rapidshare.de (65)
geocities.com (69)
digg.com (75)
digitalpoint.com (103)
126.com (105)
pornotube.com (188)
ynet.co.il (192)
21cn.com (194)
elmundo.es (248)
smileycentral.com (300)
libero.it (329)
livejasmin.com (330)
freewebs.com (339)
careerbuilder.com (388)
o2.pl (393)
sina.com (397)
juggcrew.com (404)
anonym.to (435)
startimes2.com (446)
ezinearticles.com (453)
forumer.com (469)
bangbros.com (512)
fishki.net (526)
donews.com (562)
6rooms.com (605)
yoqoo.com (617)
cjb.net (630)
myfreepaysite.com (637)
tvix.cn (666)
nichedsites.com (712)
tinyurl.com (727)
surfjunky.com (780)
as.com (785)
bolaa.com (819)
iwebtool.com (824)
perezhilton.com (832)
askjolene.com (835)
text-link-ads.com (949)
ce.cn (984)
getafreelancer.com (1053)
douban.com (1168)
thesuperficial.com (1210)
tiscali.it (1218)
1shoppingcart.com (1358)
katz.ws (1376)
clubic.com (1386)
segundamano.es (1580)
porkolt.com (1628)
indiafm.com (1656)
43things.com (1694)
wikimapia.org (1724)
ecademy.com (1749)
dreamhost.com (1819)
clickbank.net (1827)
thumblogger.com (1857)
hidebehind.com (1916)
oneindia.in (2004)
directtrack.com (2008)
egotastic.com (2019)
globes.co.il (2197)
tlen.pl (2228)
globe7.com (2263)
javimoya.com (2349)
wwtdd.com (2395)
serials.ws (2414)
sexyclips.org (2444)
techweb.com.cn (2504)
goarticles.com (2654)
furl.net (2662)
lix.in (2695)
care2.com (2747)
consumptionjunction.com (2825)
box.net (2879)
usfreeads.com (2923)
lynxtrack.com (2986)
dhl-usa.com (3010)
newsnow.co.uk (3051)
mojoflix.com (3063)
blueyonder.co.uk (3119)
fleshbot.com (3159)
freepay.com (3180)
lunarpages.com (3187)
9down.com (3289)
blinklist.com (3319)
bigpond.com (3382)
jajah.com (3596)
xpeeps.com (3603)
zooloo.co.il (3689)
m90.org (3696)
infos-du-net.com (3743)
agloco.com (3755)
johnchow.com (3887)
idontlikeyouinthatway.com (3898)
nothingtoxic.com (4007)
brinkster.com (4076)
blingo.com (4216)
earnersforum.com (4219)
6x.to (4260)
cheapflights.co.uk (4300)
naughtyathome.com (4333)
microsiervos.com (4335)
stubhub.com (4353)
justjared.com (4382)
petitiononline.com (4544)
assisass.com (4683)
ebags.com (4714)
ffshrine.org (4751)
planetnana.co.il (4769)
searchwarp.com (4912)
pimpmyspace.org (4954)
pokernews.com (4970)
totallycrap.com (5052)
giveawayoftheday.com (5089)
vbseo.com (5322)
dlisted.com (5323)
suite101.com (5361)
blogmarks.net (5436)
exploitedbabysitters.com (5480)
wierdporno.com (5537)
webworkshop.net (5846)
netidentity.com (5871)
neogaf.com (5932)
nforce.nl (5982)
parisexposed.com (6053)
defamer.com (6182)
therichjerk.com (6218)
yigg.de (6325)
ebooksclub.org (6371)
rs6.net (6400)
articlesbase.com (6445)
weakgame.com (6450)
podomatic.com (6524)
humornsex.com (6615)
vidaextra.com (6738)
clixgalore.com (6852)
todaysfreevideo.com (7001)
freeworldgroup.com (7022)
steakandcheese.com (7081)
webgains.com (7150)
crackserver.com (7159)
spankwire.com (7294)
funnyinside.com (7295)
bastardly.com (7403)
bildirgec.org (7417)
softsearch.ru (7442)
koreus.com (7560)
toprankblog.com (7568)
kingsofchaos.com (7642)
mihd.net (7977)
nastyboards.com (8118)
serialz.to (8121)
azjmp.com (8155)
totallynsfw.com (8260)
gambling911.com (8265)
shoutwire.com (8374)
poosieflix.com (8387)
stormpay.com (8475)
revenews.com (8703)
knuttz.net (8765)
gamereplays.org (8816)
indianpad.com (8867)
stormfront.org (8874)
habrahabr.ru (8900)
jkonline.cn (8976)
presseportal.de (9295)
thevideosense.com (9320)
bet365.com (9826)
offtopic.com (9841)
sweetnjuicey.com (9938)
fishki.ne (blogshares)
geeksmakemehot.com (blogshares)
mess.be (blogshares)
microsiervos.co (blogshares)
sfoxes.blogspot.com (blogshares)
popbytes.com (blogshares)
theundersigned.net (blogshares)
Methodology:
- How to test a domain on Digg. Digg performs several validation checks when a URL is submitted. After these checks, Digg takes you to a page to enter the title and description. The checks occur in this order:
- Is the URL valid?
- Has the URL been submitted before?
- Is the domain banned? Digg has three types of banning:
- url is on the banned submit list. This seems to be a permanent ban.
- This URL has been reported by users and cannot be submitted at this time. Perhaps a temporary ban? Sites previously listed with this tag don’t appear to be currently banned.
- Please link directly to the story source.This URL has been reported as a news middle-man, it will remain blocked for 0 days. It looks like the bans start at 300 days or so…
- Getting the top 10,000 domains. I used Ruby to query Amazon’s Alexa Top Sites web service and get the list of the top 10,000 sites. Five minutes later, I was $25 poorer and 10,000 domains richer.
- Constructing queryable URLs. Alexa doesn’t provide subdomain information, so I added a “www” to the front of every domain, and a fake parameter to the back of each domain, thus creating a valid, unique URL for testing. So, 43things.com became http://www.43things.com?a13=1
- I then tested all 10,000 URLs (in the middle of the night so as to not load Digg’s servers) to see if they passed all three tests. The ones that failed the ‘banned domain’ test are those I included in the list above.
Known Flaws:
- Digg blocks at the subdomain level. I didn’t have the data to query subdomains. So, I added a www at the front of every domain. I missed all subdomains such as mydiggspamblog.blogspot.com or ww2.myspamsite.com
- Not all websites accepted my fake parameter. These domains failed the valid URL test. 6% of websites didn’t return a valid page when presented with the parameter - most commonly because they perform some redirect when a user types domain root. Check out the diamond retailer: http://www.tiffany.com for an example.
- Of course, I missed many, many websites that were banned by Digg.
More resources & Related Posts:
- Muhammad Saleem of the Mu Life initially got me thinking about this with his initial 18 site long list of banned sites. He has a good post looking at the stats of several very successful Sites that were banned by Digg.
- Greywolf has a very entertaining post on how to get your competition banned from Digg.
- Which Sites do the Top Diggers Read. I looked at the 50 sites most frequently submitted by the top Diggers.
- A look at site that was Dugg 20 times in 30 days. The alexa profile of 1 site that continuously made the front page of Digg.
29 Comments
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lol 2 of our websites are in this! oh well their loss :)
great article
i cant believe sites like digitalpoint are banned
[…] Dave has a great post up about the list of sites banned from Digg. It’s a great piece of work. Dave got the top 10,000 domains from Alexa and then tested them against digg to get back a list of 183 banned domains. He also makes an insightful point about UGC sites that are banned: User Generated Content sites without subdomains. One bad actor on these sites can ruin it for everyone. Popular UGC sites like Myspace, Squidoo, 43Things, Geocities are all banned, whereas sites like Typepad, Blogspot, WordPress do just fine because it is easy to ban one bad actor. If I were Seth Godin, I’d give Squidoo lenses their own subdomains pronto – there is good content on Squidoo that will never see the light of Digg. […]
who is that girl with the duct tape – and how do i get her number?
My blog seo news blog has also been unjustly banned by digg. And this was about two days after I launched it.
Thank You
digg.com (75) ????/
whoa – great use of photos. where did you get that?
blueyonder.co.uk is an ISP in the uk, owned by NTL who is now owned by Virgin (richard Branson) why ban an ISP in the UK?
i wonder if Digg.com banned themselves too, to stop huge sites taking up the real aim of Digg.com and that is to promote pages of intrest without having huge sites hugging all the bandwidth?
thanks for posting this, very interesting :)
Photo is from istockphoto – the license was $1:
http://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup/who/character_traits/alertness/2759661_silenced.php?id=2759661
I was deciding between that photo and this one:
http://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup/gender/female/women/2653668_censored_concept_freedom_of_speech.php?id=2653668
>> lol 2 of our websites are in this! oh well their loss :)
funny. get real dude. it’s about time digg acted on the gaming rings. all you spammers get what you deserve. god forbid someone creates a valuable aggregation site without the influence of spammers and gamers.
What I have done wrong? My site’s not the list. :)
I tried submitting some of these sites and they worked fine. Huh?
Two possibilities:
1. I tested the www version of the site. If you submitted the URL with a different subdomain you’ll see different results.
2. Digg has a temporary ban in addition to its permanent ban. A very small fraction of the sites fall into this category. What was the URL you submitted?
[…] like Digg has let some of their domains back in. This follows closely behind Dave’s post on banned domains which made the front page. […]
[…] The Secret List of Sites Banned by digg (tags: digg) […]
[…] than 4 days after my post about banned websites at Digg made the front page of Digg (and was subsequently buried), Niel Patel points out that Digg has […]
[…] Dave Naffziger posted a list of 183 Sites and Blogs of the Alexa’s Top 10,000 that are banned from Digg.com. Now it seems that the ban at least for ReveNews.com was lifted. I found out during the work on an article that made a case against the Digg bans. I used some content of my original article and used it for the now different story that talks about the un-banning. […]
[…] lista está disponible en esta entrada de naffziger.net. Ha probado a enviar las URL de los 10.000 primeros puestos en Alexa por tráfico […]
[…] entire organization to arrogance that carries through to corporate policies and down to the Digg Mob that buries stories it doesn’t like simply because they don’t like […]
Sitios baneados de Digg…
Leo a Alex Vega comentar una lista de sitios baneados de Digg donde curiosamente hay seis sitios españoles que me pregunto por qué estarán ahà :P
elmundo.es
as.com
segundamano.es
javimoya.com
microsiervos.com
vidaextra.com
A javi lo leo (a vece…
[…] que el dÃa parece que va de baneos, ahora la noticia es una lista de sites baneados en Digg. La lista ha sido formada a partir de los 100.000 primeros puestos de Alexa y destaca la […]
Why do you consider gossip sites scummy?
I got banned from Digg recently. That outfit is politically slanted and being used for their own agenda. They care nothing for Free Speech. Don’t be cowed by them, just “bury” them.
Digg vs Anvil
Is there anyway to "unban" the website?
Funny i read about a man who had some coworkers dig a story on his website then he got banned. They are pretty quick with the ban hammer.
http://www.macjahisa.si/
hi
hi
I’m not to familiar with digg