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.
- wedoweb.co.cc, Digg Sets Record Straight on DiggBar URLs – http://tinyurl.com/yg2p2lw
- RT @top007: DiggBar Launches Today!: http://digg.com/d3nnVZ?t Digging just became easier!
- @ChelseaBlacker it occurred to me you may have thought I meant diggbar from digg. Not the one I’m referring to
- @T0RD Du er diggbar, takk! Men akkurat hvor teleporterte du den? Jeg kan ikke se den noe sted
- @arainert Oh, you mean a diggbar takeover. Um, no. It does not “iframe” the site, it’s injected on each page.
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My argument as to why Google would never buy Digg still stands. Digg is a system that gets gamed, and it gets gamed easily.
Great writeup, Greg, thanks for that!
Seeing that Digg are actually violating our TOS on a multitude of sites by displaying copyright protected content within their own context frame, they’re in for some jolly costly cease-and-desist letters from our solicitors soon. Being an EU based company, EU laws are all we have to be concerned about here, and they can be pretty relentless when it comes to violations of this ilk. (Think Belgium, heh…)
This, of course, is not an SEO or technical but a copyright and trademark related i.e. legal issue they’re provoking and escalating needlessly – possibly, as you’ve pointed out, with Google as an accessory.
Beats me what kind of third rate team of shysters must have counseled them on adopting this idiotic policy – but if that’s what they want, that’s what they’ll get.
And yes, frame busters are becoming an absolute requirement for every site, it seems.
That will be exciting. BTW, Matt just said on Twitter that he thinks juice does pass through a
nofollownoindex.Now I’m off to write a post about how to exploit that…
“Seeing that Digg are actually violating our TOS on a multitude of sites by displaying copyright protected content within their own context frame, they’re in for some jolly costly cease-and-desist letters from our solicitors soon.”
Doesn’t the browser chrome violate your TOS too, then. If not, what’s the difference between browser chrome and the digg bar?
I’m interested to see this play out…but mainly because of my hatred of everything Digg.
Excellent breakdown. I’m glad I’m not the only one frustrated with Digg.
If you run a website/blog, consider adding frame busting to your site:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framekiller
I am glad you are exposing Digg on this one. However, isn’t the larger issue today Twitter’s nofollow?
As you talked about in this post you mostly use twitter and not your blog anymore. All those links that you are putting in Twitter don’t count. If everyone does this it will be very difficult to get any links, especially viral ones.
I think someone should write a plug-in that would place all our tweets on our blogs that do-follow’s all the links.
Dave
I don’t think it’s the same kind of issue. If I post something to Twitter with the goal of developing links, I don’t care much that Twitter nofollows a single link on their site. (Although I do think it’s a shitty thing to do).
What I do care about is whether or not the thousands of people who potentially may visit the page I tweeted, have the ability to freely copy & paste the url to my content and do with it whatever they feel like doing. I’ll trade that kind of distribution for a nofollow any day.
I’ve been considering giving Digg the ol’ steel toed boot for a bit now.
I think this will push me over the edge.
Bastards
George
Try and I might I can’t seem to get as angry about the whole debacle as most people seem to be. Strikes me as similar to the newspapers moaning about Google – if they don’t like it they can just use robots.txt. Likewise with Digg barr, brush off your frame buster from 1999 and call it good.
Sure it’s shitty for a lot of smaller webmasters who won’t even know there’s a problem, and it further highlights what a joke Digg is, but I’m not getting the holy war vibe on this one.
Simply dusting off my personal frame buster isn’t enough for me. I think at some point, those of us who make their livings generating awareness on the web, should take a small amount of time to use those skills to fend off shit like this. Sitting around and simply caving in ultimately makes our jobs more difficult.
What makes this case worse than the attempts to get the general public to accept framejacking is the fact that so many major “tech publications” are helping Digg sell the idea. All the bullshit “Don’t worry, Digg said it’s a good thing” posts spewing out of sites like TechCrunch makes me want to puke.
I was amused to see Matt confirm the SQ team has a tool named after you though
And I’m pretty sure the chances of a tool or two being named after your boss is pretty high…
Just say no to Digg, period.
That Digg PR rebuttle did not pass the sniff test. Besides the SEO issues, I think the bigger issue is framing copyrighted content/images.
“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”
Nothing from Digg has landed in my email inbox recently. Also, rel=canonical only applies on-domain, so this usage of rel=canonical won’t result in cross-domain canonicalization happening.
Ironic that I land here and there’s a Digg bar on top. One thing I’ve become aware of is that I’ve always scanned the domain of urls I visit from Digg. With the Digg bar that is no more, all I see is the shortened Digg url. Noticed too if I bookmark that URL (which I often do on topics I like) I get the Digg shortened url version, not the original site. That kinda sucks.
I’ve intentionally not yet added the framebusting code because I want to get some usage data on it first. But it will definitely go up shortly.
Greg,
Really – noindex doesn’t pass any juice? What is the point of having noindex,follow then exactly, if it isn’t meant for passing juice onto the pages that it links to.
There is a big difference between link extraction/exploration and juice transfer. But I think you are correct in assuming that there should be some transfer with a noindex, follow. But that’s not what Digg has. They use only noindex.
Based on the examples given by the oldest robots page on the web, I think it’s safe to say that a follow should be required in order for a bot to extract links, but Google clearly doesn’t treat it that way. They absolutely do extract the links.
Awesome post Greg. If you look at site:digg.com in Google you will see diggbar url’s indexed and when you search the story title for those stories in Digg 100% of the time they are out ranking the original source. I took a screen shot, http://twitpic.com/33nz4
If that isn’t proof straight from Google that it is hoarding juice I don’t know what it. All the stories I have had go popular prior to Diggbar would rank one for their title with the Digg story url ranking 2nd.
Very interesting. I can’t find them. When they originally released it (without the noindex) they clearly had the intention of getting the frame pages to rank. Otherwise, why spent the time to inject custom title, descriptions and meta data?
I think the noindex thing was a reaction to MG’s post. If you are still finding those tomorrow, someting’s not right.
Would you consider Stumbleupon bar as an alternative to the Digg bar? I am not an expert in social bookmarking but for me Stumbleupon seemed a good alternative (and their recommandation engine is pretty cool) I was hoping the digg bar would be somewhat similar to theirs but from what I read in this article, it sounds actually somewhat “evil”.
I was interested to see the DiggBar feature because it was fairly similar to a GreaseMonkey script I wrote a while back called AddDiggControl. That script would instrument links on Digg such that when the linked page was opened, you would get a Digg box inserted into the page.
There were a few other GreaseMonkey scripts and extensions that would frame the page, but I didn’t want that because I wanted to see the page as it was written, just with my digg box added.
I can’t say I really appreciate the DiggBar, while it is an nteresting feature, I just don’t think it does as much to help the content providers as it does to line digg’s pockets.
@Rockway,
are you serious? You, of published fame, do not see the difference between browser chrome and a website frame?
An application installed on the user’s computer, displaying content requested by the user, versus injected code displaying content as if it comes from another server?
And you got a book published? seriously?
Damn, I just posted an article very similar to this on our blog today.
You beat me to it!
I’m sure many of us SEO’s are all thinking the same thing.
I identify with @Rockway.
If we’re to analyze the frame issue from a purely technical point of view then browser chrome and the Digg bar ARE equivalent.
If someone sat you down in front of an old Opera browser and typed in your website you would see ads by the Opera browser and your website.
The Digg bar displays their content, with your content below.
All they have done, technically, is to tell the browser to fill the frame with the content of your site – they haven’t copied or modified it in any way.
I don’t disagree with much of the criticism but I do like the idea of being as precise as we can.
David
Great article and great comments. I have another concern that I just thought of. Let’s say someone submits an article to digg… then someone comes across that article and decides to submit it to stumble. The would be stumbling the page on digg and not the site.
So is FrameBusters the only way to stop this?
I really appreciate the information gathered because I would not have thought there was even an issue if someone hadn’t sent me this article.
I guess I don’t understand what everyone is so worked up about.
First, if you disable Java (via the webmaster tool bar or other methods) Digg’s links look exactly like normal links. My understanding is search engines don’t execute java, so what is the problem? Furthermore none of the links are nofollowed.
Second, Digg has said many a time that a large percentage of the digging happens on the publishers site, not on the digg site. It seems to me the digg bar would encourage users to Digg your content and further increase your exposure.
Maybe I am off base here but I think you guys are freaking out about nothing.
Yea, you are way off base. Starting with the disabling Java thing. (It’s JavaScript). The est of the confusion is actually addressed in the post.
@David Doran – Nope, browser chrome you agree to by downloading the browser – it doesn’t interfere with your consumption of the internet. What they’re doing is putting a proprietary wall between content and users, and putting ads on a page with your content in another frame. It’s evil and wrong.
All I can say is “OUCH” and dang good job!
What about Facebook’s bar that uses an almost identical frame at the top? Sure, facebook only ads the bar to links you post to your profile (as far as I know). Does it just not matter as much because Google can’t crawl login-protected profiles anyway? Anyone bothered by Facebook’s approach in any way?
“Sound’s great. (But not great enough for Digg to allow it on their site?)”
This is likely to prevent submissions of submissions of submissions and other such infinite loops.
We all know of the many reasons the DiggBar should be broken and not allowed to steal content, traffic, and money from publishers.
However, there are also some benefits to blocking the DiggBar. More specifically, you can actually get more traffic by blocking it.
3 Reasons Why Breaking DiggBar Increases Website Traffic
http://tomuse.com/3-reasons-break-digg-diggbar-increase-web-site-traffic
When I saw the diggbar, what I thought personally was “took them long enough”. It seemed to me a natural progression of interface, the traditional way of submitting sites on digg seemed so stupid to me, and felt the toolbar was an obviously needed improvement (even though I don’t use digg). So I was absolutely amazed at the amount of criticism it has gotten.
I just see it as a toolbar, just as a plugin would give you, except for all the millions of people who can’t be bothered to install a plugin, or who’re on many different types of browsers. A platform-independent toolbar.
If there is a better way to make a platform-independent toolbar, I would honestly love to know. Such a thing is obviously useful, if not for digg, for many other services. Stumbleupon would have a hard time working without a toolbar for example. I wonder why they didn’t get such a huge negative reaction…
So there are a few major complaints to the diggbar. One is the SEO stuff. And if the comments pointed out on this article, and others on the web, are true, then this should not be an issue. The source on digg pages should have links directly to the dugg pages, and not another digg link, while users with javascript enabled will see the digg links. So SEO shouldn’t be hurt at all. Some people have pointed out that some digg pages have in fact been indexed by google, as evidenced by some searching. My guess is that these urls gained page rank because users posted the digg url through twitter and whatnot, thus ending up giving the digg link prominence, rather than the original url, which digg frames.
There’s the fact that traffic goes to the shortened digg url, and not the original website. Well, that just seems kind of silly to me that that should matter. The user still sees your pages, and if say you have ads, or require the user to sign up for a service by paying, or whatever, you still get that. The url says digg.com/93jrjioj or whatever, but your pages are still being viewed. I don’t see how webmasters are really hurt by this.
And I don’t know how anyone can seriously call this content stealing, unless digg starts putting ads in the bar itself (if opening up the bar to show comments etc showed an ad, I would that that’s fair play though). The content is free for anyone to see in the first place, and digg is obviously not acting like it created the content. It’s just a bar, and in terms of use, it is just like a browser plugin (or even a browser, as a couple people have noted above). Only the implementation is different. There’s even a big “X” that lets you get rid of the bar if you want. Obviously they’re not in it in a malicious way.
I do believe that the objective of the diggbar was simply to make it easier to use digg, much easier. Not to increase traffic or hurt webmasters. The traditional way to submit a link to digg is just ridiculous when you can have a toolbar.
I’ve read a lot of criticism, but I still don’t see why people think it is ethically wrong, or how it actually hurts webmasters really. I really don’t. What am I missing?
To avoid confusion: The “comments” I mention in the 4th paragraph above refers to the comments by John Quinn, which may not be so accurate, or may be an outright lie as claimed in this blog post.
Digg EXPOSED! Wow, great article…However, what about Twitter’s nofollow initiatives?
No links=no increase in traffic…issue #1.
is there no cross over between tweets and blogs in the near future? still boggles my mind that this functionality is a no show to date…hmmm thoughts?
Greg
Thanks for the post and the analysis. Anyone who has spent any time in SEO knows that a followed link on the page does not pass juice like a 301, so Diggs explanation that they are pass rank is obfuscation at best.
Still, I am very interested in your observation that a noindex robots meta (really, noindex and follow,noindex should be identical) page does not pass PR. If that is true, it is very different from the official position of Big G and would cause me to reconsider a lot of recommendations.
First, let’s start by clarifying a bit. I used the term “juice”, not PageRank.
Is it possible, that a page that only has links pointing to it from noindexed pages might at some time down the road show a bit of toolbar PR? Possibly. (although I’ve never seen it in anything I’ve tested)
Will that same page be treated the same as a straight link when it comes to all the other things that impact ranking like anchor text transfer, index inclusion, and subsequent crawl frequency? Absolutely not.
I’ve read this entire piece and comments. While I generally agree with your position, I have an issue with the tone. Again, I agree with your position. It seems like a self-promoting move.
However, I would like to think that people can disagree a little more respectfully. Saying “Digg is lying” is not particularly respectful. I would think there are other ways you could get that same point over.
So, respectfully, I agree with you. And please don’t flame me for saying this. It’s just my opinion – and I fully respect your right to express yourself however you feel is appropriate. However, I wish the way you expressed your view contained a little more respect for the business decisions that Digg and Google have made. Especially because I agree with you.
Cheers.
I’m not going to flame you. But why would I show respect for business decisions that I feel are absolutely bad for the web?
Digg won’t say who their Google source and secret SEO is who told them to do it that way. Until they do, I think saying that they lied is completely fair.
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