Digg is a new community that also provide ranking of news items. Hackers, spammers and certain legitimate both experts and newbies are trying to take advantage of this site by a process which is equivalent of link spamming. They call their approach Gaming Digg a new euphemism for spamming with Digg.

It is difficult though not impossible to execute on such spamming. These spammers are either recruiting other people who artificially dig their own site or news item, or alternatively participate in a mutual exchange of favors where spammers dig each other’s sites.

"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 process works wonderfully if people’s intentions are good. It is an equivalent of search engines process of rewarding a site to which other sites link, a process pioneered by Google search engine. However unlike Search engines methodology which is automated, Digg requires manual steps to vote for a site or news article. Initially it was thought since the process requires manual steps it is above hacking and spamming, however as the Internet continues to grow spammers have improved their methods as well.

The community approach could be applied to many online publications, including CNET News.com, and recently popular Internet content provided by sites such as Youtube. The rewards of having your sites included in top Digs are vast. It improves search engine ranking, gives more organic traffic (without the spend of marketing dollars) and can bring huge revenue dollars in terms of advertising revenues. Some sites are considering using Digg as a new marketing technique.

Blogger of post “The Spam Farms of the Social Web” notes that exploiting Digg and other such social sites is a new trend in Internet. He described how a story on weight loss was promoted on a totally unrelated Dental insurance site.

In rumors on Internet AOL has been touted to Dig their own stories using their Staff members. Though we could not confirm the rumor but the news has invited a lot of Internet community attention.

There are SEO companies that are revamping their programs to include Digg strategy in their arsenals. Companies have come up with programs such as 10 steps to guarantee to be on Digg’s front page. The trend is only getting bigger. People are carving businesses around Digg promotion. These businesses charge anything from ten grand to 100 thousand of dollars depending on business or site being promoted. These people are using euphemisms such as gaming Digg instead of spamming with Digg to justify their acts.

Marketing, Gaming Digg or Spamming whatever the term you use it is a fact and reality on Internet now. We have to live with it.