Post by Aditya Rao
Digg.com the popular content sharing site has recently launched its new Diggbar tool, which can be placed on any web page simply by adding “digg.com/” before any URL. This top-of-the-page toolbar contains everything required for Digging a story–including a submit button and a Digg vote function. The strategy was very clear, to take on rival StumbleUpon head on, using a pleasant mix of new features and a killer in built URL shortening service.
It harvested a lot of positive buzz in the beginning, but a week has passed and analysts have started pointing out the faults. One argument is that it will hurt incoming traffic to the page because the toolbar is an iframe, meaning Digg keeps all of the page views and publishers will mistakenly see double the page views. It will also obviously increase the loading time for the page. The initial theory that the bar redirects all the incoming links juice, Google PageRank, etc. to the original source through the use of basic links has also been proved wrong.
Digg is currently putting the “rel=canonical” meta tag into every modified page, but unfortunately this approach doesn’t work across domains so search engine bots will completely ignore the original source page! This means that the Digg page will get all the favourable SEO points and rank higher in search results.
The response of Digg.com to these disputes are still awaited, which would surely be causing the upper management some sleepless nights.
Didn’t your story come too late? Digg has already said they will remove diggbar for users that are not logged in and they have also said that search engines won’t see diggbar either.
That’s another web2.0 company that heard their users and have corrected things.