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.

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.

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month

Today is the start of breast cancer awareness month. During the month of October you are likely to see more information about breast cancer than you may have seen all year. The difference is that you can help spread the word by focusing on the topic for at least one month. It’s easy. All you have to do is stumble, delicious, digg, reddit, kirtsy whatever article you see related to increasing awareness.

Help increase the flow of the topic on the web and help save the tatas.

Oh and one more thing you can do.  Turn Twiiter Pink.  Do you remember Green Friday, the ode to @gregboser?

Just imagine it looking like this…

So step up and go pink!

In my industry  everyone knows what an RSS button is for.  Outside…in the real world…most people don’t have a clue.  In fact, it’s confusing and clicking on it could be a catastrophe to someone that is not computer savvy. My thoughts on this though is too bad. Teach your users what it is and let them decide whether or not they want to use it.

Here’s my scenario…I volunteered to build a site for our local pop warner football association.  It turned into adding sites for track and cheer as well. All of these were built on our Wordpress platform (the one that kicks ass).  Anyway, I had a GoTo meeting to do some training with the moms that had volunteered to run the sites.  Hands down, they hated the RSS button.  They wanted it gone and didn’t care that it offered a feature to users that subscribe to feeds.  They said that they had received phone calls from parents complaining because "they clicked on it and ended up on another site, then they couldn’t figure out how to get back".

So fine, we took it off.

This really frustrated me because I enjoy teaching people about the internet and 99% of the time everyone is very receptive to the learning.  So when a group puts up the hand to one of the best things to come out of Web 2.0 it blows me away.  Whatever.

The way I see it the button should be displayed prominently at the top of your blog kinda like how it is on mine:) I can’t stand it when I spend 10-30 seconds trying to find an RSS button. 

The worst are the blogs that have it in a text link at the very bottom where you can barely see it like this:

I’ve built a few feeds in my day and trying to find the feed button is very difficult most of the time.  I have found blogs that are actually SEM blogs and they don’t have a button at all.

So please, if you have a blog display your RSS button at the top so it’s easy for your visitors to subscribe.   Just slap it up there and who knows, you may be pleased at the results.

If you are a top submitter on Digg have you noticed the need for more Diggs to get your story to the FP.   I know I have.  It was a few months back when they made their change to the shout system that I seem to remember having gone through this, then things settled down a bit.  Having 151 diggs and not hitting the front page is lame and frustrating.  At least Digg is being fair though…see the last story.  Even Kevin Rose isn’t hitting home with 120 diggs.  Ya think they did that on purpose to try and give the impression that everybody is equal and what’s good for Mr. Rose is good for everyone else?  

]]> http://www.3dogmedia.com/digg-algo-changes/feed/ 0 http://www.3dogmedia.com/computer-pack-rat/ http://www.3dogmedia.com/computer-pack-rat/#comments Tue, 08 Jan 2008 02:03:48 +0000 barbara
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http://www.seowife.com/computer-pack-rat/

Over the holiday break Greg cleaned up both my laptop and desktop.  Apparently I am a computer pack rat, based on all the "OMG, you still have emails from 2005" and "OMG, haven’t you ever emptied your recycle bin"?

Yes.  It’s true. Whenever I save something I think I’m going to use in the near future I save it to my desktop.  I do save every email that is sent to me, even all the ones telling me that somebody wrote on my Facebook wall.  The recycle bin has not been touched in well over a year and when Outlook asks me to archive, I close the window.  There… it’s out, I said it and I’m not going to do it anymore.

Funny thing is that with everything else I am not that way.  I give things away, shred documents I don’t need and throw things out regularly.  I hate clutter.  For whatever reason though, I like having 100 icons on my desktop to have a click away.  I don’t mind it at all and I know where everything is.  Or should I say, I knew where everything was.  Greg was nice enough to organize and delete things for me and what do you know, my computer runs so much faster now. 

So the only New Years resolution I made this year is to stay on top of my recycle bin,  archive my email and file away my docs and spreadsheets. 

Am I the only one that does this or are there other computer pack rats out there?

It’s Friday morning and this time of the year is always a busy and stressful time for me.  As I’m sure everyone does, I have way more going on at this time of the year than any other month.  That said, I don’t need any more stress or snags in my plans or schedule.  Wednesday night I came across a huge snag, error, disappointment…whatever you want to call it.  I was up until 1:45am all thanks to Travelocity and American Airlines and their customer service (or lack thereof).

I actually wrote the following while I was on hold with these two companies on and off for over 3 hours and since I was so upset that evening, I decided not to publish it because I wanted to give them the opportunity to address this with me, but It’s now Friday morning and I have yet to hear from the customer relations department, so I figure I want to share my experience with all of my internet friends and maybe someone from Travelocity will respond to the letter I faxed to them at 1:30am on 12/13.

Here goes… 

I have been sitting on hold trying to use a flight credit that was issued to my daughter this past July.  At about 9:30pm I logged in to Travelocity to search for flights for a trip we are taking to Oregon.  I figured it wouldn’t be too big of a deal.  After all, I have a trip ID number, cancellation number, credit number and the name of the person I spoke with back on July 23rd. 

It’s now 11:43pm (yes, over 2 hours later) During this time I have been on the phone with Travelocity three times and American Airlines twice.  Currently I am sitting on hold with Travelocity waiting for a manager to pick up the phone.  I called them at 11:21 and have been on hold hating Travelocity and hating the person that originally processed my credit and made some lame error that has resulted in this enormous waste of my time.

Here’s what’s happening…

I called Travelocity the first time because when I went to check out online, there was no option for me to use a flight credit.  I spoke with a representative who transferred me to another representative who informed me that their system was down and I should call American Airlines to use my credit anyway.  Fine.

I went to American’s site and found the ame flight for $20 less.  Super.  Same thing happened, at check out, there is no place for me to enter my credit code.  So I called American, who transferred me to aa.com.  That was pretty quick, so whatever.  The rep at aa.com informed me that my credit code was coming up as UNK (Unknown) and I’d have to take it up with Travelocity.

Frustrated, but I understand that shit happens so I called Travelocity back and explained the problem, the rep there seemed to be investigating it  and got back on the phone with me to tell me that it had to be processed through aa.com.  She had called aa.com and told me she had an aa rep on the phone that said she could take care of me.  Sounds easy, the two ladies spoke and one told the other my information and the other said she could help me.  After holding with the aa rep while she investigated further, she got back on the line and told me the credit number I had isn’t really a credit number, it’s an itinerary number and it appears to be blank, so there is nothing she can do.  She told me I had to call Travelocity to get this resolved.

At this point I’m extremely pissed.  The tone I’m getting from the reps is insinuating to me that I don’t have a credit at all and at one point the woman implied that my daughter did use her ticket.

So it’s now 11:53, I’m still on hold with Travelocity from when I called them at 11:21 and asked to speak with a manager.  Good to know managers keep customers on hold for 30 minutes.

The likelihood that I’ll use Travelocity again is zero seeing as this is the 2nd most horrible customer service experience I’ve ever had.  The first (btw) was with my cable company a few years back when they shut our cable off after I called to cancel the internet.  Our cable was off for almost a week with two young kids. No Nickelodeon, no Rugrats.  It was horrible.  The cable company at least gave me 3 months of free cable to compensate me.  It’s doubtful that Travelocity will do anything, but we’ll see if the gnome makes appearance and takes care of me.  So far no gnome in sight.

Now 11:59, hanging up and calling Travelocity back…again.

Now on hold again (12:10) talking to Travelocity rep ‘Marcus’ sounds like there is progress in sight. Bad news.  Marcus came back and repeated the same thing the other Travelocity reps said, that I have to call aa.com to use the credit. I asked Marcus to please conference call with aa.com so I could avoid the he said she said fiasco.  He was able to connect with Derik from aa.com who (with an ‘I don’t give a crap’) attitude told me he didn’t show the ticket at all and there was nothing he could do. 

Marcus is now saying Travelocity cannot re-issue the ticket and that I’ll have to take it up with their customer relations department.  He was kind enough to give me the Fax # 800-944-0005.  Rather than writing a lengthy letter, maybe I’ll just copy and paste this blog post.

What I don’t get is that this credit is for about $700 or so.  Travelocity is a multi-million dollar company that has left a customer of over 10 years lost in between a conflict between them and aa.com.  Travelocity says they cannot re-issue the ticket and aa.com says they can’t find the credit.  So were is my credit?  Maybe the gnome took it?

It’s now 12:48pm, before I publish this article I’m going to give the Travelocity consumer relations department the benefit of the doubt and see if they can resolve by tomorrow.

Updated 12/20

Last night I received a survey to take about my recent experience with Travelocity’s customer service.  Of course the review I gave was horrible.  Today I received this via email:

RE: Credit for the cancel reservation

Sincerely,
Shirley P.
Travelocity Consumer Relations

Note to self…it takes 1 week for Travelocity’s consumer relations to respond to their customers so they must be VERY busy! 

National ‘whatever’ Days are a fun way to honor or make an excuse to do something you may or may not normally do. Yesterday, my daughter told me that today was National Marijuana Day. Should I be worried? At any rate, I asked her why? Her response was that it was Bob Marley’s birthday.

Having nothing better to do this morning I searched the web to try and find out if it was true. So here’s a post dedicated to some of my favorite SEO’s (no links here).

April 20th is known as National Marijuana Day, not because it is Bob Marley’s birthday, but because of a group of high school kids at San Rafael High School in Ca. Back in 1971 these kids would meet daily at 4:20 to light up. Over the years, the 4:20 time evolved into 4/20 and is now referred to as National Marijuana Day.

BTW-Bob Marley was born on February 6, 1945.

Here’s another SEO that has recognized another National Day.

Any suggestions for a National SEO Day? When is Danny’s birthday? It’d be another excuse to have a party conference.

Happy celebrating!

One of the perks of being married to an SEO Rockstar is the wining and dining we get to do when we travel. At SES New York last week we had the best dinner of our lives at ESCA, owned and operated by Dave Pasternack, Chef Extraordinaire.

When you walk into ESCA you will immediately be greeted by some of the most courteous and welcoming staff you will ever encounter. Our table was located in the main dining room right by the wall of wine. As we were being seated we noticed that Chef Dave Pasternack himself was sitting with a friend at the table right next to us. We immediately recognized him and introduced ourselves and asked if we could take a photo with him. He was very kind and obliged us all, then even sent over some delicious appetizers ‘compliments of the chef’.

The menu at ESCA changes daily based on the fish markets and farms’ availability or perhaps on what Chef Pasternack has caught on his latest fishing trip. The menu offers many choices, Oilman recommended that we try the Tasting Menu and I am so glad he did. This is a five course meal that will keep you busy for about two hours eating and drinking some of the best food and wine you will ever eat while being surrounded, bar none, by the best service you will ever have.

My favorite course was the Primi-Spaghetti Neri (Black Spaghetti). I had never seen black spaghetti before. It was fabulous! They are house made noodles combined with calamari, green chilies and roasted garlic.

This was definitely one of the highlights of our trip. If you ever have the opportunity to meet Dave Pasternack I’m sure you’ll agree that he’s kind of like a character on the Sopranos, but man can he cook!

You won’t have to search too hard to find ESCA, just tell the cabby to take you to the ‘five star restaurant’ located at 402 West 43rd Street. Make sure you call and make a reservation – 212-564-7272.

We will definitely be returning there on our annual trips to the big apple!

Here are some of the pixs of Greg Boser, Todd Freisen and Michael Gray from the dinner. Also there, but not in the pictures were Dax, Cesar and Jonah Stein.

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It’s a great saying, that doesn’t always apply to blogs. At lease it didn’t apply to mine until yesterday.

I have been really enjoying watching the traffic to my blog and I am so flattered that folks have taken an interest in what I thought was a fun idea. I’ve gotten some new ideas for some more SEO/Celebrity look-a-likes, but I think I’ll hold off until the next conference to post any more.

I am really loving this right now, you have no idea the SEO bragging rights this gives me in my house. (Even if it only lasts for a couple days.)

Special thanks to all the look-a-likes that were such good sports and to J for a great post.