Yesterday, Lee Odden posted about his blog being banned from Digg. A few of his stories were submitted and his domain was basically labeled as spam. The result?  A lifetime banning from Digg. Don’t pass Go, don’t collect $200 – go straight to the Digg Jail. This hit home because Lee’s site is an excellent resource and you would be hard-pressed to find someone who would ever view it as spam. It is a site that focuses on SEO and social marketing.

Digg URL bannings have occurred for awhile but it was usually sites that were MFA (Made For AdSense) or some guy submitting every page from his Viagra “resource” site to try and build links. But there have been other sites that have been banned unjustly IMO. Here’s a list of the ones that I came up with:

Lee Odden’s Online Marketing Blog – explained above

John Chow - one of the highest profile bannings that really caught fire

Digital Point - yep, the entire forum is banned

Squidoo - no Lens for you or for anyone else for that matter

Text Link Ads - people were submitting stories with their affiliate IDs in the URL, as a result TLA is banned

SEO News Blog – having the letters SEO in your URL can’t be good. More from Todd on that here

ecademy - a social networking site with over 100,000 users isn’t allowed to submit any stories either

SearchBliss - a webmaster resource site

Connected Internet - this owner never even got the standard response from Digg regarding his ban

Real Estate Webmasters - the owner of the site figured out why they were banned

Rock My Monkey - their ‘Digg of the Day’ inadvertently got them banned

Paul Stamatiou - Paul hasn’t published any info about this but he confirmed his banning to Tamar via email

Paula Mooney – Paula is not sure if it was her Digg button or her cracks about Democrats

Can they come back? The Mu Life points out that Digg partners Revision3 (Diggnation) were at one point banned but somehow overcame this, despite this statement:

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.

So, Digg can obviously un-ban a domain especially if they have close ties to them.

Graywolf had a great post this week called How to be a Dirty Digger where he lays out some simple steps to get basically any site you want banned in Digg. The sad thing is that this is basically true at this point. Can you imagine if it was this easy on the search engines?

As Digg continues to grow in popularity this will become an even bigger problem. I was thinking about it and my first thought was ‘They should have a reinclusion process like Google‘. That would be a start and be good for the Real Estate Webmaster guy who knows specifically why he was banned. But what about someone like Lee Odden – who has no clue as to the reason why he was banned? Shouldn’t Digg have policies for reincluding sites? Manual reviews? I know that this would increase support costs and perhaps decrease “Democracy in Action” but isn’t strong user generated content what drives Digg? The stories I Digg are equally split between big sites and blogs (yes – including SEO blogs). If they were to ban all SEO blogs they would be losing a strong part of the community that helped make Digg the site it is today.

The URL list above is by no means complete but just some of the ones that I know about and were able to find info on. If you have others – please feel free to add them.