Now that the heat has been turned up on Digg, scrutiny is also spilling over to all the “up-and-coming” services who have decided to jump on the “justifiable framing bandwagon.”

One of those services is BurnURL. The concept of BurnURL is pretty simple: You input a url and it spits out a shortened version that you can then use for distribution. But like Digg, they do not implement a simple 301. Instead, they wrap your page in a frame bar.

Also like Digg, they recently published a “don’t worry, we’re not evil” blog post assuring everyone that they have taken steps to prevent any negative impact on publishers.

We’ve always been a very publishers focused company (both with Readburner and BurnURL) and we intend to keep it that way.  We, from the very creation of BurnURL, wanted to make sure the focus was on publishers and their content versus on us and we’ve put quite a few steps in place to do that.

One of the changes we recently put live was to remove the Sharebar when we detected the user-agents of Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask (these four account for the largest portions of search traffic).  These crawlers don’t need to see the Sharebar (as they’re not going to interact wtih it), so we don’t need to serve it to them.  Instead we feed them a 301 redirect.  This tells them the URL that was burned is the original content owner and it should be listed in the index on that topic.  Our shortened URL effectively gets ignored.

While I am certainly an SEO who appreciates “bot only” technical solutions for SEO related issues, I still find myself wondering how/why the operators of sites like BurnURL don’t understand the “big-picture” issues.

So let me try and explain them one more time.

1. The SEO Value Isn’t the 301 Itself – Bouncing Googlebot through a 301 served from a url Google has never indexed does not generate the type of “juice transfer” people think. The bump from 301 based adtracking/affiliate programs has been on the decline for quite awhile. I won’t go into the specifics in this post, but the short version is that Google is getting much better at figuring out when a 301 is being used as it was originally intended, (moving content that they most likely have already indexed to a new location) and when it’s being used as a bounce.

2. The SEO Value is in the Preservation of the Destination URL – The URLs generated by traditional 301 shorteners in and of themselves are not going to contribute much to improving your organic visibility. But they do play a significant secondary role by making sure that EVERYONE ends up on the URL that the PUBLISHER intended the content to be viewed from. That is extremely important, because it is from that point that the viral distribution process actually begins.

The Bottom Line:

If you are running any type of service that actively encourages the viral distribution of frame wrapped content you do not own, you are a steaming pile of shit. Period.  There simply is no way for you to spin it as some type of “we’re here to support publishers” bullshit. The only reason you do what you do is to gain exposure for your company off the backs of others hard work. So stop being a pile of shit and go figure out how to create something of actual value.