Is it Illegal to create a Digg Group?

My question is this, we all know that Digg can do wonders for sending tons of traffic to your website, but is it illegal to create a group of individuals whose sole purpose is to Digg each other's articles and get them placed on the front page?

I run a premium membership website and I recently added Digg buttons to my members only and free content. I then offered a premium membership to all of my free members that would be willing to Digg three of my most popular free content items.

The next day, I checked my inbox, and I had over 700 requests for me to upgrade free members to premium memberships, and more than 800 Diggs on those three articles that I was advertising. My sales for that day jumped by almost 50 percent and my traffic was close to 10 times my average.

Needless to say, I'm now trying to figure out more creative ways of leveraging the power of social bookmarking, more importantly Digg. So if anyone has any idea of whether or not this is proper, please let me know

Thanks

 

I doubt it is illegal in the "go to jail" sense, but it is probably against the digg terms. I would imagine you would get banned from digg when/if they found out.

 

Not illegal... nothing against the law. But certainly against their terms and conditions. This method used to work really well in 2006... but since then they've changed the algorithm to discourage these kind of things. So you can get 900 diggs and still not hit the front page

 

Not to mention there system will catch on to all of the same accounts digging your content each day and ban a lot of those user's. Trying to game the system can be fun, but also frustrating at times because you need to try and stay one step ahead some how.

 

They will just ban your digg account IMO

 

Yes it break digg tos don't do this.
If they found out,your digg account gonna be history

 

It is against their terms but hey when did that ever stop anyone?

 

I network with other twitter designers and their always asking for diggs and manage to get on the front page very often.

I think you just need to mix a bit and not always have the same people doing it.

 

That is against their terms and would probably result to your account being banned from their system.