Pick the Brain Banned By Digg for False Reason

I have been a regular reader of pickthebrain for several months. It provides a good selection of articles on self-improvement. Recently, I have also contributed a few guest post articles of my own.

Because of the consistent quality and variety of articles, Pick the Brain, has seen its RSS readership reach over 10,000 in just over 12 months. Several articles from the website have also reached the front page of Digg.

I was rather bemused to find that when I tried to submit an article to Digg it gave the following message:

URL blocked

This domain has been consistently flagged as an intermediary to the direct source of news and/or video content. Please link directly to the story source.

The first thing to point out is that Pick The Brain has never used ‘recycled’ content from elsewhere on the web. All articles are original and uniquely written, they are also written by a variety of authors. Therefore, there is no good reason for Digg to block the URL.

This occured 3 weeks ago, so I wrote to Digg asking to change this error (I believe the owner of Pick the Brain also wrote to Digg). However, 3 weeks later nothing has changed and I received no reply.

It is bad that Digg have blocked the URL for a false reason. - It may be the case some users didn’t like the fact Pick The Brain often made the front page (like other sites such as lifehack.org and Smashingmagazine.com)

If it is the case that certain sites make the front page too often, the solution is for Digg to tweak the algorithm so that it is more difficult for ‘big’ sites to make it on home page. (I believe Digg already do this to an extent.)

However, Digg have no good reason to ban a site, for a reason that isn’t true.

Yes, Pick The Brain have had several articles on the homepage. But, that is because they have been voted up by Digg Users. They are not ‘replicated’ content, but articles people like to read.

Of course, Digg can do whatever it likes. It’s their site and there probably is a real problem of some spam blogs submitting duplicate content in the hope of benefiting from it. However, it reflects badly on Digg that they are blocking a site which produces good content, often appreciated by the Digg community in the past.

Also, why are Digg unable to respond to a legitimate question? - They are unfairly blaming Pick The Brain with being an intermediary - an accusation that is not true.

Let us hope Digg will take notice and only ban sites with care.