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.

I am not sure when this feature was added, but I just discovered it thanks to a stumbler friend of mine giving me the tip. (Thanks Roby!)

Basically all you need to do is go to your ‘favorites’ then hover over the image and then a ’share’ button appears.

From there, you can choose what friends to share with and voila!  The days of sending to one friend at a time are over.

Thank you StumbleUpon. Nice!

I woke up this morning to a nice Stumble Upon surprise.  It looks like you can now friend over 200 people on Stumble.  The only thing is that after you add friends it seems to be taking a while for you friends list to update (if it ever does) and same with the toolbar.

Here’s some of the new changes I stumbled upon this morning.

After opening my inbox I discovered this message:

This is new and I like it because it gives you an indication that someone has friended you where as in the past, the only way you’d know is if you knew what the fan number was on a daily basis.

So after accepting the friend request nothing different happened, other than I was curious and started adding people to see if it would let me…and it did.

This is what you see now to add friends. 

SU is also telling you if you have similar interests

So apparently there is a limit with how many friends you can add at any given time.  I got this message after about 15  or so.

They have also changed the name of fans to subscribers and like I said before, the page with your fans subscribers is not updating right away so I have no idea who I added this morning.  At least I know they’ll get a message from me though. 

Lastly…avatars now come with  the online indicator next to them.  Not too sure if I care about that, but I guess it’s nice to know if someone is online at a glance instead of having to look at their page.

I have not found an official announcement and did not find anything on the SU website stating this, but I do know that I’ve been maxed out on friends for a long while and was able to add more this morning.  I hope they leave it like this.  Who needs Ebay anyway?

As I stated in my SESSJ post Twitter was a hot topic at the conference.  People were talking about it and people were using it.  When Greg and I go to conferences we always turn on our mobile tweets so we can keep up with where everyone is and what everyone’s doing.  God forbid we miss something good.

Between the two of us we have about 1700 followers (Greg has more damn it). Now I know a few hundred of those are bots, but the point is we’ve been on Twitter less than a year and that’s a lot of frickn people to be connected to throughout the day.  In fact it was last year at Pubcon that Vanessa Fox forced talked us into signing up.  We were very resistant to it.  We thought it was totally lame and only for total nerds.  Nine months later we are admittedly hooked on Twitter. 

Twitter has so many benefits and the opportunities you can find on Twitter are endless.  It isn’t going anywhere and with over one million users, everyday that passes before you join is a missed opportunity for you.  Stop asking how and why.  Stop saying you just don’t know what to do or what to say.  Stop saying nobody cares what you would tweet about.  It’s a simple question…What are you doing?  Answer it a few times a day. 

Still a hater?  Let me give you some examples of some amazing, funny, interesting things that happen on Twitter.

Proposals
In March of 2008 the micro-blogging world was privy to its first virtual wedding proposal. 

and she said

If you want to know more about this one you can check out the Wired post or follow them on Twitter.

Survival
In April of 08 James Karl Buck, a UC Berkeley graduate student, was in Egypt covering a protest when he and his translator were arrested.  James reached for his cell phone and tweeted one word.

Now can you imagine the stress and anxiety you’d feel if you were across the world and got arrested and were unsure of what was going to happen to you.  James was eventually released, but he had the comfort knowing that all of his followers knew what had happened.  Not planning on traveling to foreign countries? Replace the word arrested with ‘accident’ or ‘robbed’ or ‘help’.  It could come in handy.

Finding a Job
Look out Monster here comes Twitter.

Customer Service
Many companies are using Twitter to reach out to their customers and to keep an ear open for people talking about them.

Now I know from first hand experience that when you complain about @southwestair on Twitter, they respond.  Just one more reason why I FLY SWA. A couple other companies tweeting are @starbucks  and @jetblue.

Diggs

You might totally suck at getting stories to the Digg front page (not saying this guy does), but if you have enough people following you on Twitter, you may just get enough of a boost to get noticed on the Digg upcoming.  Of course your story still has to be good.

Host a Party

So just like that, we’re having a party.  Tony tweets it and all of his followers in LA get the message and we are getting together (the 6th is fine for me Tony, see you at the Bow).

Having a Baby

I found this one on BlogHer.  Now granted she didn’t actually do it because well, she wasn’t in labor long enough :/.  It’s only a matter of time though.

Expose Dumbness
Michael Gray is really good at this.  In fact if there were a crown for the best Twitterer…he’d be wearing it.

In case you’re wondering what Michael is talking about here’s the link to the LA Times home page.  I’d actually be interested in an explanation too.

Ask a Question

Chris wrote up a great presentation about Twitter using all of his responses from this question.  Just brilliant!

Breaking News
This past week I have been marveling about how so many of my bloggy mom friends are at the DNC.  My tweets from them have gone crazy and I almost feel like I was there.  Getting all this breaking news every few seconds is better than watching it on TV.

I hope you’re more intrigued and give it a try.  Just do it.  Join Twitter today and of course follow @barbaraboser and @gregboser.

Stumbleupon has a feature that I really like.  SU users have the option to look at their favorites and other SU blogs in a grid format.

This is either new or I have honestly never seen the link at the top right corner before.

At any rate, the reason I am a fan of the grid is for 2 reasons:

1. Occasionally some sneaky SU users will change the page after it has been stumbled.  The fact that SU now takes a screenshot and displays the original stumble is great for the reviewer.

2. Finding good SU friends is not as easy as it may sound.  Some users only stumble their own sites. If that’s the case, when I click on their avatar to see what they are stumbling, it’s so easy to see all the screenshots and know at a glance that this user is only in it for themselves.

If you are on StumbleUpon, give it a try.  If you aren’t a Stumble user, what the heck are you waiting for?  Get with the program.  

I just received  this St Patrick’s Day box from Social Spark. 

It was a nice surprise.  I had met one of these Social Sparkers at SMX and the box was not necessary, but much appreciated.  It did indeed spark my interest to see what Social Spark was all about.

So basically, they are an online social marketing network.  It’s a place that brings advertisers and bloggers together.  They have a network of over 100k bloggers, so I imagine if you are looking for a writer, this might be a good place to go search for one.

I’m leaving for New York on Sunday, so don’t know if I’ll have time to play around with this further til I get back, but if you go to their site, there’s a video that describes what they do in more detail.

Anyway, thanks for think of me guys!  I’ll take my St. Patty’s Day stuff to the big apple! 

I spoke yesterday at the SMX West conference on Social Media/SEO.  My presentation was based on how to build a strong social media presence (in about 60 days or less).

A few people asked if I would upload the power point for them, so here it is.

I’ll be writing more on this over the next few weeks as a follow up to the slides.  Heading back down to the conference now. 

Having recently become addicted to my Twitter feed, Greg gave me a heads up on TwitBox.  So far I really like it.  Once downloaded this lovely box sits on your screen and auto-uploads every minute or so.  To reply to fellow twits, just double click on their avatar and voila!  I don’t know how I’m going to get any work done with this, but I really do like it.

Go here to download the TwitBox

If you haven’t heard of Pownce, basically it’s a site that allows you to send things to your friends or fans.  Things can be images, music, links, messages, etc.

Pownce has been around for awhile, but has been invite only up until yesterday when they opened the doors to anyone and everyone.

If you have a profile on a social media site, it wouldn’t hurt to join Pownce using the same profile.  You’re bound to see many users from other social sites.

It’s really just one more place to network and meet friends.  The Pownce profile page also lets you add some of your other social sites profiles very easily.