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Last week I noticed yet again that my Digg app wasn’t working – I had been checking it out for months since I joined the early beta last year. I couldn’t login for a week or so and it just figured I needed to update the app or something. So I jumped over on desktop and lo and behold, the Digg relaunch had been shut down – and it was because of SEO spam!
It’s bad enough that I have to spend every waking minute of my life as an SEO professional defending to others (mostly voices in my head) that what I do for a living is, in fact, not spam. But sure enough that’s the kind of “SEO” that brought down the comeback of a much-beloved website from the mid-2000’s, and seeing it just made me throw up my hands at the sad state that “SEO” has become in today’s business-marketing-tech culture.
We’re Still Stuck in SEO-Metric Misinformation
When Digg announced its relaunch in early 2026, content creators (many who take SEO seriously) saw social discovery returning to the “good old days” – before micro-blogging (re:Twitter, Facebook, and alogrthms feeding us chaos). Unfortunately, spammers just saw a “legacy authority” domain they could easily submit links to and claim they are “doing SEO” for their clients or projects or, more than likely, selling this as a service to obtain “high domain authority backlinks”.
Even though digg.com had been dormant for years, SEO tools still show the Digg.com domain as a “high authority domain”. That’s not the fault of a Moz or an Ahrefs.
The fault here lies in the customer of these backlinks, who continue to buy-in on the notion that just getting a link from a domain with a higher DA/DR score attached to it is going to give them magic SEO juice.
Here’s the timeline of Digg’s relaunch and subsequent death-by-link-spam:
- Relaunch. As part of its 2025 relaunch announcement, the company opened its doors on January 14, 2026, to the general public, allowing users to register and create communities.
- Bot Surge. The site was soon swamped by automated traffic and artificially generated spam links, aimed at piggy-backing on their legacy “authority”.
- Hard Reset. By March 14, 2026, the experiment had come to an end. The Digg app was officially withdrawn two months after launch, the staff was slashed, and a “hard reset” went into effect.
Justin Mezzell, the company’s CEO, admitted that artificial intelligence had made a human community impossible. The death of Digg (again) was caused by its being treated as a backlink directory before it could even operate as a social discovery network.
In essence, this is the root cause of spam: an obsession with “domain authority” over really valuable human content. While founder Kevin Rose is reportedly returning full-time in April 2026, the damage has already been done. To collect the copper wiring in the walls, spammers burned down the house.
Valueable SEO vs. The Fiverr “Metric Factory”
For those new here, this spam-link industry thrives on misinformation regarding domain authority (DA) and domain rating (DR), third-party “scores” developed by Moz and Ahrefs. These metrics are widely used, including by myself, to gauge the authority of a domain. If you understand the 500 other things you need to use to determine the value of a backlink from a given domain, then these scores are valuable. If you don’t, then these scores can be misread.
Taking a closer look at the spammer playbook, you’ll see how spammy SEO folk can manipulate DA/DR scores to sell links to the misinformed. Some examples include using redirect loops (pointing old government or university URLs at a site) and zombie PBNs (low-quality sites that only link to one another) to artificially inflate these numbers. When you buy a “DA 70” link from a Fiverr spreadsheet, you probably aren’t getting the value you think you are.
The reality? A site can have a DA of 80 and still have zero visitors. If a site does not have real traffic, real users – real authority on a topic, it’s not doing your SEO any good. Link “brokers” need to consistently add new domains to their list of sites they can sell links from, and when Digg relaunched, with it’s key feature being that you can submit links to a website, this was an easy addition.
And that’s just the beginning. Add this to bots who scour the web for places to add backlinks in volume (like link comment spam, where if you get 5000 links with the same anchor text it *may* influence something for your SEO), and then factor in even more advanced AI tools that manipulated Digg’s basic features (voting and commenting), and you have a web product ripe for spam-destruction.
The Irony of the “Good Old Days”
Ironically, Digg was, in its original heyday, a place where SEO’s went to build real, actual links to their websites. I know, because some of my early blogging efforts hit the font page of Digg and got my sites HUNDREDS of links. How was this possible? The trick was simple: produce quality, kick-ass content. To get those valuable backlinks, your post had to go viral with real humans. The content had to provide serious value, create memes or hilarious listicles, or be informative.
The irony is that today’s AI spammers are trying to shorten a process that only works with humans. As a result, they destroy the platforms that they target, as the rewards aren’t worth the effort. If I sound like an old man longing for an Internet of the past, it’s because I am.
Now get off my lawn.
Most People Need to Stop Trying to “Game” Google
Because spammers’ incentives are completely disconnected from reality, they’re ruining the REAL link building industry. Let me be very open and clear here – there are real link vendors and platforms, builders and strategies, that exist. Their are REAL ways to build links that move the needle in Google search. There is a good way to do this that I call this process SEO.
At the end of the day:
- Business owners want customers.
- Users want answers.
- Google connects the dots, turning answers into customers.
- Spammers only want to trick business owners into thinking their efforts can influence this.
Stop Enabling Stupidity
Decision makers need to do their homework and stop buying shit links or supporting stupid link schemes that claim to give them results. Unless you are a smart and savvy link builder who knows what you’re doing, this stuff never works for those who purchase links from spammers.
Links from a niche-relevant blog with 500 loyal readers are worth far more than links from a “DA 90” zombie site.
Study credible link building and if you’re laying money down for links, study the things to look for outside of a single metric to determine the value of said link.
For Digg, and other platforms looking to offer content discovery – I wish you the best in trying to counter the spam, because lord-knows this blogger alone isn’t going to save us from it.