On the heels of the recently launched Techmeme Leaderboard, Patrick Altoft at BlogStorm has cobbled together an unofficial list of sites that have the most Digg juice. The ranking is based on Google’s site search (how many results come back for a search of “site:digg.com arstechnica.com,” for instance, a site which happens to be No. 4 on both lists). The sites with the most links on Digg rank highest.
The No. 1 site is YouTube, followed by Yahoo and Google. No surprises there. Only three blogs make it into the top ten (Ars Technica, Engadget, and Gizmodo). The rest are major news sites (BBC, Wired, CNN) and Wikipedia. TechCrunch is No. 41 on BlogStorm’s Digg list.
The problem with this Digg Leaderboard is that it doesn’t filter out anything. It would be useful to know, for instance, which sites get linked to on Digg’s homepage the most, or on the front page of each of its topic sections. (Kevin Rose, are you reading this?) But this list doesn’t do that. Instead, it counts any link on Digg, even deep in the member comments. Since so many blogs and sites constantly put up their own stuff on Digg and actively campaign to get those links on Digg’s homepage, you’ve got to wonder how that impacts these rankings. Any Digg Leaderboard, for that matter, would be particularly susceptible to such spamming campaigns.