Digg banning domains - open to abuse?

Lee Odden has apparently had his domain banned by Digg.

According to a support email from Digg:

“When submitted stories are consistently reported as spam and users complain via our feedback email about submission spam, we ban the domain. The domain will not be unbanned. The domain would consistently get reported as spam otherwise.”

-The Digg Support Team.

And the spam reports are…?

“All the users decided to email digg on spam about the seo sites. It is their way of stopping them getting on digg even if they are not spamming. They also modified version 4 to stop spammers as well by removing the “befriend” feature on digg. Their version of spam is not splogs, but instead what the users don’t like (seo sites)”

That’s accordingly to Lee.

Now, the initial response would be to presume it’s sour grapes. He’s an SEO, maybe he’s been gaming Digg?

Aside from denying this, Peter T Davis points out that Sitepoint has also been banned by Digg.

Now that’s plain strange. Or narrow minded, perhaps?

Apparently not - a list of some of the more high-profile domains banned by Digg is listed at 10e20 - and it includes places such as DigitalPoint and Squidoo, Seth Godin’s entrepreneur site.

It’s difficult to form a picture of the full story so far, but it looks like Digg could be suffering from over-popularity - and cutting off their noses to spite their faces over the issue.

In fact, Michael Gray list simply ways in which you can potentially ban competitors from Digg.

Meanwhile RevenueGirl asks some very interesting questions about the value of Digg itself.

All in all, the suggestion of Digg’s popularity imploding the site doesn’t seem particularly shocking - all the more reason to look twice at Pligg and start setting up those niche content news sites.