Over the last couple of months, I’ve been getting the urge to get back into blogging a bit. However, when it’s been awhile since you’ve attempted to construct a thought longer than a 140 character tweet, actually doing it is a bit harder than you regular bloggers might imagine. I keep finding myself sitting around waiting for a topic to come along that instantly compels me to start typing.

Well guess what? Today is the day. And the compelling topic turns out to be Digg’s new amazing DiggBar.  In cased you missed the announcement, here is the Digg’s explanation of what the DiggBar is:

“The DiggBar enables you to Digg, read comments, find related content, and share stuff from any page on the Web. And it’s presented in a short URL format, making it easy to share in emails, on Twitter, and via other services. In addition to finding it on all outbound links from Digg, you can generate the DiggBar using any of the following solutions.”

Here’s what it should say:

“The DiggBar is an incredibly clever framejacking tool disguised as a URL shortening service. The mass adoption of the DiggBar by the thousands of users who constantly distribute un-digg-worthy content through our most feared competitor, will allow us to generate millions of additional revenue dollars by injecting our ads in between our feared competitor and the destination url.”

Shortly after the release of the DiggBar, in an article about URL shortening services, Danny Sullivan wrote the following regarding the DiggBar:

“Like lin.cr, it does a 200 code. That means the page is actually on Digg itself – they’re making a page with the DiggBar and pulling in your content without permission into a frame. That’s not illegal, but it’s a tactic that died off years ago. It also means that if you use the Digg short URLs, none of the link credit passes to your page. It’s all kept with Digg.

There’s no need for you to give Digg all your link credit. If you want to shorten your URLs, use a service that does a 301 redirect.”

In response to Danny’s criticism, John Quinn Posted the following on Digg’s blog:

“Prior to launching the DiggBar, we reached out to Google and SEO experts to ensure we adhered to the leading best practices, as we framed and linked directly to source content via the DiggBar. This process involved gathering feedback from publishers to ensure the execution was as content-provider-friendly as possible. 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.”

He then goes on to add:

“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. This is recommended by Google, Ask.com, Microsoft and Yahoo!.”

Sound’s great. (But not great enough for Digg to allow it on their site?)

But here’s the problem… Based on everything publicly published for us common folk, plus a ton of personal testing, I can tell you that the claims in Digg’s post are a flat out lie.

Lest’s start with the noindex part .  A page excluded from Google’s index either by robots.txt or via a noindex meta tag will develop juice, but it absolutely does not pass it. For that claim to be even remotely true, you would need to at least use “noindex, follow” (which Digg doesn’t) and from all my personal testing, that doesn’t work either.

Now for the canonical part. (aka RelCan)

From Google’s official blog post regarding the introduction of RelCan:

Can this link tag be used to suggest a canonical URL on a completely different domain?

“No. To migrate to a completely different domain, permanent (301) redirects are more appropriate. Google currently will take canonicalization suggestions into account across subdomains (or within a domain), but not across domains. So site owners can suggest www.example.com vs. example.com vs. help.example.com, but not example.com vs. example-widgets.com

Based on that, the big question is whether Digg is lying or a backroom secret handshake took place between Google and Digg which lead to Google giving Digg preferential treatment by honoring a cross-domain RelCan tag. I have no way of knowing because neither company is talking, but I did notice the the RelCan Digg uses contains a source tag at the end.

Could that be the secret code that tells Google to count it, even though they have been told to ignore the page? Maybe.

But lets explore the idea that Digg is just lying.

Think about it for a moment. You invest countless hours promoting your content. You get lucky enough to make the homepage of Digg, or you hit the Retweet motherload on Twitter. A certain percentage of all those people who see your content are going to copy & paste the link they land on into a blog post. (Thereby generating a link for your site).

Before the DiggBar, (and with legit shortening services) all those links would point to your url. Now, a large percentage of them are going to be links pointing to a page on Digg. Now if you are Yahoo, CNN, or the BBC, that isn’t really going to matter much. You don’t have to spend time thinking about building link equity, because you already have it. However, if you are a newer site struggling to build trusted link equity in the current black hole environment we live in, the mass adoption of the DiggBar is a serious issue.

I will be advising all clients to add some frame busting code to their sites so the DiggBar won’t work for the simple reason that regarless which scenario is accurate, they are both equally wrong.

Hopefully, others will do the same.

Update: 4-13-09

The DiggBar discussion on Twitter has been incredible. Here’s the most recent Tweets.

We’ve had a lot of great response to our DoFollow OPML project. While we work on compiling the list, I thought I would go ahead and release a new DoFollow plugin. We have been playing with several different plugins lately. Of all the ones we could find, we like the original by Kimmo Souminen the best. However, I wanted to have more control on a per-comment basis, so I had Dax add to it.

Once you’ve installed and activated it, you will be able add individual NoFollows or DoFollows from the comment moderation screen.

You will also find a new box on your editor that will allow you to add NoFollow to the comments of a single post.  

You can download it here.

I’m excited to announce the launch of a new project that has pretty much consumed all of the last 5 months for us. PropertyTown is our new marketing platform built exclusively for real estate professionals.

Project Background

I spent a good chunk of ‘06 and the first half of ‘07 doing some consulting work for a couple different companies in the real estate space. During those gigs, I spent a great deal of time looking at many of the companies providing hosting and marketing services for real estate agents. I was truly stunned at how poor most of the services were. The majority of the companies we looked at were selling less-than-optimal platforms and giving their customers very poor marketing advice.  

When our last consulting contract was about to expire, we took some time to think about where we wanted to go. One of the options was for us to take on a new consulting job with a very large company that provided marketing services to thousands of agents. Our role in that project would have been providing them advice on how to develop new web 2.0 type applications that would help get their clients up to speed with the rest of the online marketing world. However, after a couple meetings, it became very clear to me that this particular company had far too much corporate bloat to ever be able to develop anything remotely cool in any type of reasonable time frame.

So we decided instead to explore the option of developing a product of our own. The biggest challenge was coming up with a plan that would not only be unique, but also fit us as a company. That meant that whatever we decided to do, it wasn’t going to be a high-volume, mass-marketed product. Instead, it needed to be something where we could leverage not only our programming capabilities, but also our years of SEO/SEM consulting experience.

We initially got the project rolling by recruiting a handful of real estate agents who were interested in participating in a beta program. We started banging out code and they spent a ton of time trying to break it. (And they did break it) They also had a huge role in feature development. They told us what they wanted, and for the most part, we built it. But the beta program wasn’t just about code. It was also about helping the agents learn new ways to build their online presence that wouldn’t end up getting them in trouble.

The project as a whole has been quite challenging. Turning Wordpress into a true CMS, and teaching real estate agents that there’s more to online marketing than keyword-stuffed reciprocal links were no easy tasks. But it’s all been worth it. In 5 months, we’ve accomplished more than some of the big “players” have accomplished in the last 3 years. We developed a ton of really cool features and tools, and our beta agents are doing exceptionally well. In fact, everything is now running so smoothly that we’ve decided it’s time to open up our community to new agents.

Join Our Community

If you’re a real estate professional who gets the web, and is tired of all the poor performance and broken promises that exist in today’s agent services market, swing buy the PropertyTown site and submit the contact form. We’ll follow up with you and schedule a call to discuss all the details involved with joining our community.

Join Our Affiliate Program

Also, if you’re someone who provides any other types of services for real estate professionals, you might want to seriously consider becoming a PropertyTown affiliate. We are offering a two-tier referral program that pays recurring monthly revenue for the life of the client.

One of the things that happened over the summer while I was on my blogging hiatus was the launch of the “Do Follow” movement. For those that haven’t heard about it, it’s basically a group of bloggers who have realized that having comments and trackback links automatically default to “No Follow” isn’t really a good thing. (And it certainly hasn’t stopped the number of people attempting to spam comments).

The core concept behind the Do Follow movement is something I genuinely support. I’ve always moderated my comments, so anyone being a jackass never makes it live. Those that do make it through are either personal friends or trusted colleagues who I wouldn’t have any problem “vouching” for.

But the overall implementation of the idea in my opinion has been pretty poor. When I browsed through the many Do Follow Blogrolls or Do Follow directories, I found quite a few blogs that I would consider either poor quality or sites that are promoting things (selling text link ads or blog reviews) that I personally don’t want to be connected with. (From a linking standpoint).

I also noticed that for the most part, being part of the “movement” hasn’t really helped improve the level of participation in the majority of the blogs on the list. I think the biggest reason for that is the fact that the only real requirement to get on the list was to install a Do Follow plugin, and then put a copy of the list on your site. In the end, that just created a clever link swapping scheme. So once people got their sites added to the list, their support for the concept went away.

When everything was said and done, I found that the highest quality “Do Follow” blogs I cam across were ones that I found by accident. They weren’t on any published list, and they also weren’t displaying any kind badge that announced to the world that they support “Do Follow.” They were just great blogs being run by people who took the time to remove the link condoms, install the appropriate spam plugins, and dedicate some time to proper comment moderation.

Blogs with those qualities are the type of sites I’d like to spend time on. And those types of blog owners are the kind of people I would love to have comment on my blog, and in exchange for their commentary, I’d be more than willing ditch the love glove.

But there really wasn’t any easy way to find and connect with these types of sites. So I thought I would borrow an idea from Lee and try and put something together.

We have begun the process of collecting and categorizing feeds from quality sites that are not on any of the published Do Follow lists, and do not display any information declaring that they are a “Do Follow” blog. Once we have a good quality list built, we’ll turn it into an OPML file so it can easily be uploaded into any feed reader. The Do Follow OPML file isn’t going to be available to the general public.

So how can you get a copy?

Pretty simple really. Just help us build the list. If you have a blog that you think would be worthy, just visit our submission form and submit it. We will review your site and then make a decision on whether or not we will include it. If we do decide to include it, we will provide you with a copy of the OPML file, plus provide you regular updates as the list grows.

In the meantime, if you would like to start the process of going Do Follow, you find a great list of plugins here. 

Monday marked the official end of summer, which means my self-imposed blogging hiatus is now complete.  Going over 4 months without regularly reading any blogs or blogging myself was quite enlightening. The biggest thing I learned was how much time I actually wasted drifting around in the blogosphere every day.  Not starting the day firing up Google reader left me quite a bit more time to focus on some projects that have been sitting around on the backburner for quite some time.

One of those projects was putting WebGuerrilla out to pasture. As much as I liked the name, I’ve also always hated it. There’s just way too many letters and it’s also impossible for most people to spell.  

It also no longer reflects where we are going as a company.  Although SEO is, and probably always will be a big part of what we do, we’re expanding into several other areas as well, so I felt it was time to make a change. I’m not quite ready to talk about the new venture, but I’ll be posting more about it in the near future.

In the meantime, welcome to my personal blog. I do plan on continuing to post about search marketing on this site, but I’m also going to spend time posting about whatever else interests me. If you’d rather not listen to me ramble on about non-search stuff, you can simply subscribe to my work feed.