For Diggnation and Twitterers everywhere, last week was a time to rejoice. Digg launched the DiggBar to rave reviews that claimed it exponentially simplified the task of submitting new stories and comments (excuse the slight exaggeration). By all accounts, it was the greatest thing since sliced bread (and the overused cliché). Popular technology news blog TechCrunch featured the story “DiggBar Keeps All Digg Homepage Traffic on Digg,” applauding the “brilliant move by Digg” and suggesting the Twitter crowd already loves it.
There are two disturbing realities to TechCrunch’s praise. First, they are correct: It is a smart move by Digg, but at the expense of all sites that are now linked with the short Digg URL. You see, Digg now cleverly and unobtrusively wraps all content of other sites within an iFrame, keeping viewers on Digg.com as opposed to the source of the original content. Without getting too technical, Digg is essentially cheating its way to increased traffic and ad revenue by keeping any content linked with the DiggBar and the short Digg URL within the Digg domain. As a consequence, the source link is replaced with the short Digg URL, which kills the Google ranking of the source site (no link juice) and passes on all the credit to Digg. Secondly, without this knowledge, many will be quick to adopt what is a convenient method of linking stories, as TechCrunch alludes. With the explosive growth of Twitter, this is a dangerous proposition: The spread of the short Digg URL could cause a decline in original source content links everywhere. All the while, Digg profits from the associated surge in traffic and ranking.
Additionally, what TechCrunch fails to mention is that the DiggBar also controls meta tags, filling in the meta description and keywords for the linked site with the default meta keywords “Digg, Digg.com, news, images, videos, vote, content.” Ultimately, this hurts the source site’s SEO, although meta tags aren’t as important for search engine optimization as they once were.
Seems a bit wrong, no? That’s because it is. Popular technology pundit John Gruber, writer of Daring Fireball, shares the sentiment and created a special version of his site for DiggBar users which offers some harsher words for Digg.
Boycott the DiggBar by doing the following:
1. Whenever you come across the DiggBar, promptly disable the toolbar by clicking the down arrow next to the large “X” on the right and activate “Always hide the toolbar.”
2. Whenever in need of a short URL, use one that employs the proper 301 redirect. Fortunately, there are a number of URL shortening services, namely bit.ly, tinyurl, is.gd, and piurl. My current favorite is is.gd which offers the shortest URLs I’ve seen for those in need of the extra characters for tweeting purposes. There happens to be a fantastic Firefox add-on that places its bookmark icon in your toolbar. It will shorten the URL of the page you’re currently viewing and place it on the clipboard so that you won’t have to navigate away from the page of interest. You can paste it wherever you’d like afterward.
3. If you come across a short Digg URL, expand it to the source URL and if you need to shorten it, use one of the shortening services above. This sounds like a pain but really it takes about five seconds.
4. If you are owner of a site, break out of the iFrame using JavaScript.
I’ve had trouble accurately describing what Google Wave is exactly. At its highest level, Google Wave is the next revolution in communication. Period. And businesses would be foolish to be ignorant and not harness what will certainly be the most powerful communication tool since e-mail.
