C-net’s Stephen Spencer blogged about commercial companies hiding their truly financial motives when trying to game digg. He gives an example of bait and switch diggbait:

Those who have cracked Digg tend to understand the psychology of Digg users. For example, these alpha geeks love lists. And they absolutely abhor SEOs, because they think SEOs are all trying to game the system on Digg. If they sniff out that an SEO is behind a Digg submission, the submission will get buried and the URL may even get banned…

Knowing this, it would behoove you to remove anything commercial from the landing page of your Digg bait before it gets dugg. Note how Alan’s Digg bait is devoid of links to or mentions of his consulting company. Instead, he links to sites like Makezine and Ubuntu, which would appeal to alpha geeks. Very smart.

Alpha geek status is a counter-cultural one. In its own (and very powerful) way it is rebellion, against social norms and common knowledge. Selling rebellion makes the selling a little more authentic, a little less commercial.