In the debate over whether or not URL shorteners are evil, one service in particular has been singled out: Digg’s new Diggbar. The Diggbar is more than just a URL shortener, but that is one of its main features. Unlike other shorteners, however, which redirect people back to the original link being abbreviated (often for Tweeting purposes), the Diggbar directs traffic back to a Digg.com.
The concern this raises is that if a lot of people start using the Diggbar and its special shortened URLs, Digg will effectively be stealing link juice from the original sites being linked to, which won’t get the proper credit they deserve from search engines. In technical terms, the Diggbar produces a 200 server code instead of a 301 redirect (Danny Sullivan explains the difference here), and on the surface that just does not seem kosher.
But in a post today, Digg VP of engineering John Quinn promises everyone that Digg is not trying to steal any link juice and has taken extra measures to make sure search engines and others credit the original links. He writes:
We took several steps to ensure that search engines continue to count the original source, versus registering the DiggBar as new content. We include only links to the source URLs on Digg pages to allow spiders to see the unmodified links to source sites. These links are overwritten to short URLs in JavaScript for users who have this preference.
We launched a few additional updates early this week to address some lingering concerns in the SEO and publishing communities around the infamous (and sometimes mysterious) search engine ‘juice’. We always represent the source URL as the preferred version of the URL to search engines and use the meta noindex tag to keep DiggBar pages out of search indexes. For those of you interested in the technical details, we also include link rel=”canonical” information to indicate that the original URL is the real (canonical) version. Additional URL properties, like PageRank and related signals, are transferred as well.
So crisis averted: the link structure of the Web remains intact. Whew, now I can go back to using the Diggbar. And I won’t be alone. Quinn also notes that since the launch of the Diggbar, “We’ve seen a 20% lift in unique visitors and many content providers have experienced similar traffic bumps this past week.” If the Diggbar can do that consistently going forward, nobody is going to be complaining about it anymore—even if URL shorteners are still evil.
Update: Maybe the crisis hasn’t been averted. Some serious questions are still being raised, lots of people think that apart from the URL redirect issue framing Websites is evil in and of itself. John Gruber at Daring Fireball is so mad that he released this code to block the Diggbar from any site.
“Whew, no I can go back to using the Diggbar” I think you meant “now”
judas…
This was a good bailout for beloved digg. Everyone makes anybody only till they make money.
hehe don’t say “not evil” just yet.
if the diggbar appears in the search results, that’s going to be a big mess – it’s not providing any thing original but because of some backlinks they’re getting their stuff in to the search engine pages.
I mean if the page no longer exists, the digg bar effectively provides nothing of value to the user and therefore shouldn’t be listed in the search index right? WRONG – regardless of whether the site is dead, the diggbar is still going to send out that 200-OK status meaning google will still list it, even though the original site is dead or has moved.
@Seo Sultan
“…and use the meta noindex tag to keep DiggBar pages out of search indexes.”
I wonder if all the other URL shorteners out there represent the source URL as the preferred version of the URL to search engines and use the meta noindex tag to keep pages out of the search indexes?
Anyone know?
Follow me now @ http://twitter.com/IanMikutel
Most shortening services just redirect the browsers to the final destination via 301 Permanent Redirection. Very few (none that I personally know of) actually send the user a webpage in response.
If you’re unfamiliar, you can learn more about how Google handles 301’s here: http://www.seom...-301-experiment
Bulls**t, this is PR crud from Digg.
They are effectively stealing traffic, content, and money from publishers:
http://tomuse.c...money-publisher
And they are displaying the DiggBar without user consent which is essentially spamming:
http://tomuse.c...-need-your-help
Christ, not this clown again. He’s been trolling the hacker news forums for the past week trying raise ppl up in arms over this, but given the reasoned cool-headedness of the HN folk, his efforts were for naught.
Kevin – stop, take a deep breath, pull your head out of your ass and actually spend some time THINKING about this. The diggbar takes nothing away from you.
what does digg do? do we really need digg? i think we have been lost in the middle of the Internet?
They use to help you find interesting stories, but now they just FRAME SPAM your ass.
This is like the dog wagging the deafening roar in the crowd.
what is this digg i keep hearing about?
Digg is using the new canonical tag and the no-index meta tag, but the digg bar pages are absolutely being indexed:
http://www.goog...om&as_qdr=w
Setting aside this is Digg reassuring us they do no wrong with respect to “juuice,” there are other matters to consider.
framing other peoples content is just wrong, and its sad to see Digg and Facebook (and others) take this approach.
It hardly surprises me that as a result of hijacking the visit that used to go to the originating site, ““We’ve seen a 20% lift in unique visitors.”
I agree 100% It feels like we are back in 1996 with all of the B.S. outbound framing going on.
I concur Robert. Here’s was the future holds for this framing frenzy:
http://tomuse.c...users-large.png
We’re looking at nothing but frames within frames within frames.
I like to call it “FRAME SPAMMING”. Essentially that’s what it is because these appear without the consent of the user.
Furthermore, some are already using them to generate revenue too. I asked some of the Digg reps if they intend to share that revenue with the publishers and I got no reply…what a surprise.
It hardly surprises me that as a result of hijacking the visit that used to go to the originating site, ““We’ve seen a 20% lift in unique visitors.”
Exactly. Numbers like this obviously prove that Digg isn’t hijacking anything. People just plain love them more now!
So, what do you think of others adopting this strategy? There will be nothing left of the web except frames. Is that such a good idea?
can someone explain to me how they arrived at this figure?
1) the bar is fucking annoying (take that shit off my screen)
2) if you go to anything in inside that frame, and then close the diggbar, it takes you back to the originally linked page — not where you were when you clicked close
annoying people does not increasing users in any way, shape, or form.
it would be one thing to frame only for logged in users, but they’re not doing that — they do it for everyone.
Facebook is doing the same.
A lame comment without a selflink? This truly is a new era.
A lame response without a selflink? Let us both continue this trend.
This Digg-bar must be the worst and irritating thing Digg has came up with in a long time.
For me, the problem is not where it directs traffic. It’s just in the way. When I click on a link this “Shit” comes up and blocks the view with it’s ugliness and it won’t go away. You have to click like mad and and finally it goes away and it won’t show you the site-URL before you remove it. it’s awful and useless. What’s the point with it? WHAT’S THE POINT? There is no advantage with it all. Remove it NOW! Instead of putting resources to develop this kind of useless features Digg should combat the bots and spammers instead…
The ONLY one to benifit from people using the “Digg toolbar” is Digg itself. It’s an ugly piece of crap. If I want to bookmark a website I don’t want to bookmark the “Digg” URL for it.
But of course the Digg fanboys will love it just like anything that Kevin does.
I long for the old days when Digg used to contain actual news on it’s front page.
There is no such thing as a 200 redirect.
Since Techcrunch is solely intended to be a source of bad journalism, innumeracy comes as no surprise.
wow, came all the way over to this site to say that?
all the way over? are you new2internet?
‘all the way over’? are you retarded?
The internet is series of tubes that hater must travel to tell someone else how much they suck.
I think this is a typo and he means 302 redirect (temporary redirect)
Nah, he means “200 redirect”, so to speak.
What I mean by that is: Digg accepts the shortened url as a valid resource on their server, and responds the Digg bar as well as an iframe with the original content beneath it.
Nowhere is the original content credited with the shortened link, beyond the “link canonical” tag which does nothing in this case, as the origin domain is different than digg.com, so the search engines likely ignore Digg’s canonical tag.
I meant that the server spits out a 200 code (”OK”) instead of a 301 redirect. fixed it in the post.
Bug: DiGGbar leaves lines on websites in safari four when you scroll down then back up. Other than that.. love it.
$40mm in and this is the best Digg can come up with to stay relevant.
I think the party is almost over at Digg HQ
dugg
The best moment of my day yesterday was when I discovered how to turn it off.
agreed. their marketing is exposed, which is not good marketing.
Links on twitter are “nofollow”, so why is everyone so worried about “link juice” from them being stolen?
Because this is not only about twitter, people post these URL’s on tons of sites.
The only people who use Digg are SEM’s that pay anywhere from $1000-$5000 to appear on the front page, it’s extremely easy to do and just a google search away. Outside of the paid placement crowd, about 50% of the frontpage articles are hand-selected by Digg editors. It’s a totally lame service and not in the hands of the average user at all, no wonder Google backed out of the deal.
I love the toolbar and don’t ever use Digg.
What’s the problem? You don’t like it? Just click X. No one’s forcing you to use it.
the problem is that clicking ‘X’ takes you BACK to the original page instead of leaving you on the page you’re trying to click to.
That is truly annoying.
I heard from many sources that Digg doesn’t really have the democratic news publishing. It shocked me when I heard Digg does take money if you want to push your article to the top. That’s pretty shady. Am sure, Digg clones can’t kill Digg, but companies like http://www.boilingpage.com can be a potential Digg killer. Boilingpage shows the hottest pages on the web based on how popular they are in Twitter and it’s the best real-time websearch engine I’ve ever seen so far. Here’s the real-time webpage search in http://www.boilingpage.com for ‘Digg’:
http://www.boil...php?search=digg
Wow, it’s like the greatest ever spam!
John Quinns doesn’t make any sense.
As Pat Hawks said above there is no 200 redirect. The diggbar is framing pages with a noindex tag. This isn’t going to pass any juice to the publishers page at all, even if they do have a cross domain canonical tag in there.
Other shorteners are atleast implementing actual redirects.
Techcrunch with only 49 diggs come on guys!
Truth is, I want people to digg my stuff. so i want to use the digg bar for certain things. other things get sent to my twitter via friend feed and google alert rss so I don’t need digg for that. The other point is I am 100% for any service that offers additional features to people who share links to me. (I don’t have to personally use it) The last thought is – I can’t remember why Frames are bad. I remember in the early 90s reading some lengthy posts and dialogs on Internet morals but I have since forgot the one on frames. every time I read the comments I see people who seem really upset about the “Ugly” frame bar, google and facebook and digg and the growing number of winners are using these things. maybe “frame hate” is old school. I think of people who react as the old guy who says guys can’t wear earrings – as I write this I am wondering if I have seen a xkcd comic to this effect. Don’t get left behind, retro frame bars are the new black. snoop has got one and 50 cent. so.. stop snitchin and stop frame hatin
From the looks of the design of your personal website I can see why you have no clue.
Yup, I got a lame site. My design skill are a bit off – way off even. Thanks. Still, Digg, Facebook, Google… They seem to be putting a bit of money in peoples pockets and those people are saying hey, lets do it with a frame bar. My lack of design skills don’t change that. It seems the people that put big money up seem to be be ignoring the anti frame rhetoric of the early 90s (that the 50’s in internet years) just an opinion / observation. if you don’t like it … um… diss my site or call me a name or something.
hey, no fair. I just looked at your sight and it’s not that much different than mine. I’ll have a picture up in like a week. and you left the link off like i wasn’t going to google you. are you kidding me?
Maybe if you were around back then you’d know that frames were actually introduced in IE3 and HTML4. That’s 1998, but I’m sure you knew that and were just saying “early 90s” for effect.
From the look of yours, you don’t have one either.
Quinn’s explanation makes sense. Disable Javascript on Digg.com and click through to the original content URL. Brilliant!
I wrote about technical details: http://www.tjkw...not-seo-killer/
But this is the whole point, if you disable Javascript can only the original link be found. This means that the search engines do not pick up the original link.
But Digg is also trying to ’steal’ traffic by republishing the posts of weak blogs and ranking above them in search results.
This has been a common theme of content aggregators
I’ve notice that in some browsers the DiggBar really slows performance of the page rendering (likely due to the number of javascript calls processed on load). It really impedes the browsing experience from a visual standpoint and browser functionality.
DiggBar = buried.
Interesting … I just realized that Google Images has been wrapping pages for quite some time. Might be for our own protection, but it’s definitely never received the wrath of the blogs like Digg and others.
HTTP 200 is not a redirect. 200 means “OK”
I couldn’t really care (much) about the SEO implications of this Digg Crap. I just hate the f*cking thing as a user.
1) it makes it harder for me to bookmark pages I come across via Digg. I’ll always end up bookmarking the “shortened” DiggBar Link, not the original URL.
2) It screws up my browsing history, as ALL pages visited from Digg now have the Digg favicon. Which makes it harder for me to quickly find stuff I want to go back to.
I see NO benefit from the thing to me as a user. And I simply HATE the fact that they enable it by default and then force me to create a Digg account and sign in in order to store the preference tht I would like to NOT use the Digg Bar.
What a fucking piece of shit. I keep getting this shit when I click on links from delicious feeds. Who are the fucking asswipes who use this shit to bookmark? Digg, the new motherfucking about.com bullshit.
Furthermore, I would say that getting “link juice” from Digg is not even 1/100th as important as getting actual traffic from Digg (which the Diggbar does not inhibit in any way). Digg is essentially just a search engine that sorts in a much more interesting way, so for Google to award “link juice” because a site shows up on another search engine doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. An appearance on Digg is not the same as an appearance on a reputable blog. They both may drive traffic, but only a collection of the latter actually derives anything meaningful for Google.
I think the point here is that people will be linking the shortened digg.com url on their blogs/social bookmarking sites/etc, instead of the full original url.
Google doesn’t care how many people are looking at your site pages, they care about how many sites are linking (directly) to those pages.
I will not click through on a link if I know the resulting domain to be vexatious, so the masking is my point of contention.
I wonder how Digg is going to address those publishers, like The New York Times, who block the Digg toolbar by default.
As per Danny Sullivan’s code, here is how to remove the Digg bar from your site:
<script type="text/javascript">
<!–
if (top.location!= self.location) {
top.location = self.location.href
}
//–>
</script>
i just love digg but somehow i always endup getting dugg down
Canonical tag can only be used within the same domain, so it is meaningless to use canonical tag on Digg.com pointing to some other domain. Either they try to fool the webmaster with this “canonical” story, either they don’t know how to properly use the canonical tag.
For me, all those frames, including Digg, Facebook and others are evil. What if Google decide to add its own frame each time when you search the web page through Google?
Can you imagine how would web look alike.
Michael,
This is really bad reporting.
At the very least a reporter for Techcrunch should be able to understand the rudiments of rank, trust, and reputation on the web. I don’t expect them to be an SEO expert, but this is ridiculous.
In fact, the crisis with Digg has not been averted. But I won’t waste any more time turning to TechCrunch for further insight.
Diggbar is framing web sites without consent AND putting their ads in on top of that! That’s the big concern to me, over SEO stuff.
Sites and users alike hated it 10 years ago and users clearly hate it now. But Digg isn’t getting a lot of hate from bloggers and tech journalists. I guess when the “cool kids” put ads on other sites through framing, it’s OK.
Yeah, I’m disappointed that TC and Mashable haven’t blocked the DiggBar and as well as other frame spammers. Thankfully the WSJ doesn’t allow frames. I’m glad to see sites like PlaigarismToday, SearchEngineJournal, and Graywolf’s SEO Blog denounce the behavior.
I think the worry is that it wouldn’t generate as many Diggs or traffic via the framer but that’s not true. Despite blocking all frames on my site, my article frowning upon the DiggBar got quite a few Diggs, more than I’ve ever received before actually. Thus, breaking the DiggBar on your site doesn’t prevent people from Digging it, Stumbling it, Twittering it, or sharing it with in any other way.
If anything, breaking the DiggBar is good because it keeps the user from passing by since once they come to your site via the DiggBar, it breaks, and reloads your site. Further more it prevents Digg from gaining links from Google that may rank higher in the SERPS than your original content.
See here: http://www.goog...amp;btnG=Search
The link above shows Digg holding the #1 and #2 positions whereas PopularMechanics, the creator of the original content, has the #3 position.
This is evil!!!!
someone to stop that?
diggbar was stolen from hookk. http://hookk.com.
very similar functionality and more advanced in some respects except it doesn’t appear to steal backlinks.
It seems to me that there has never been so many people ticked off about Digg before, so if Digg wants to stay king they better start working hard to fix the problems or more people may move over to Mixx or Reddit.
I haven’t been digging for more than a month now due to twitter.. How about you? Which will you prefer, Digg or Twitter?
Hehehe, people get pretty fired up about losing their link juice!
Regarding they “won’t get proper credit from search engines.”
Surely this is a search engine problem????
The whole purpose of their algorithms is presumably to get the most relevant content for the term… and if Digg ends up showing highest and its not the most relevant then that’s their problem.
I don’t see any need for Digg to worry about that.
Could care less about the SEO implications. The framing of the website, thecreating a linkable URL that goes to digg and not the original site is the issue.
Way to go backwards with the internet Digg.
I for one think it’s fairly unobtrusive and useful.
I still don’t know who thought iframing everyone’s site and replacing their domain name with a tiny URL was a good idea. TinyURLs should redirect. Good for Digg bad for the users and the web itself. I hope they end up pulling it.
Selfish means to an end.
The digg bar provides zero value to the user, its just a way for digg to generate more page views. I’ve stopped visiting digg because of it. It reminds me of about.com 5 years ago.
thanks