I’ve seen a lot of blog posts and news articles lately about the new DiggBar. First, if you are luck (or shall I say talented) enough to get an articles with a lot of Diggs, you will be getting a lot of free traffic. However the new DiggBar seems to be interfering with PageRanks.
Pros: First the new tool bar adds some features. Users can easily Digg, Tweet, Facebook or eMail a news article or post without having to go back to Digg. Assumed result: More Diggs. Second the DiggBar shows how many users have viewed the page. Third, its a short URL service. There’s a lot of short URL services but this one will allow you to also get Diggs (example my short URL is: http://digg.com/u1lie). Which I automatically generated by typing in http://digg.com/www.rhinowebservices.com into my browser address box.
Cons: On downside, DiggBar is framing you in. The DiggBar generates an iFrame that renders your page. Services like Comscore might not give you credit for the page view. Second, while the bar is not that big, Digg could include advertising on the DiggBar. Perhaps cool if you could somehow get a percentage of that revenue, not so great if you can’t. Third, the DiggBar does not appear to do a 301 redirect according to some (3DoggMedia, Search Engine Land, etc.). Which means Digg keeps the SEO credit for your page. However, Digg’s John Quinn says:
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.
John Gruber of the Daring Fireball has written a short PHP script to redirect the Diggbar that generates a message to the Digg user.
As well you can use Framekiller JavaScript like we did years ago when Frames were in fashion. So I guess the DiggBar is a Retro Web 1.0 traffic and unique users grabbing scheme to boost to Digg’s own metrics (and to be fair they claim it is boosting Digg featured sites as well:
The preliminary results have been exciting, and we continue to learn and make real-time updates to the DiggBar. We’ve seen a 20% lift in unique visitors and many content providers have experienced similar traffic bumps this past week. Digg continues to have a symbiotic relationship with content publishers, and we anticipate these ongoing improvements will only enhance publisher traffic as more people discover and share content on Digg.
Personally I turned it off, as I didn’t want to use it. I am not sure I would implement a protest counter measure to block the bar from my site though other than just a normal JavaScript framebuster.
<script language=”JavaScript” type=”text/javascript”>
if (top.location != self.location) top.location.replace(self.location);
</script>
