Digg Bar Launched And Exploited
8th April 2009
Last month we had reported on a potential Digg toolbar that would compete with StumbleUpon.
Digg has now launched a new product called the ‘DiggBar’, which appears at the top of the browser whenever users click on any story on Digg. The DiggBar is portable to any website, making social news sharing much easier, but ways to exploit it are already cropping up.
The quasi-toolbar provides a lot of facilities to make it easier to Digg content. The DiggBar allows users to Digg content directly on a site, instead of having to move back and forth repeatedly, between the destination site and the Digg submission page.
Screenshot of DiggBar above a story on BBC.co.uk.
In order to view the DiggBar, users need to merely type “http://dig.com/” before the webpage address. A short URL will be created for that page and theDiggBar will appear at the top, framing the page.
Users can share interesting stories, via email, Twitter and Facebook, easily through the DiggBar. They can also see the top comment, the latest comment and the most controversial comment posted for the story on Digg, while still on the story page.
The DiggBar also shows the number of Diggs, pageviews for the page, related stories, and other stories from the same site on Digg.
Much like the StumbleUpon bar, the DiggBar includes a ‘Random’ button that brings up a random Digg story for users to browse and rate.
Users of the Twitter desktop application ‘Twhirl’ can expect an update, which will allow them to use Digg as their default short URL service.
While all of this is largely positive news for the once darling of social media, the DiggBar is already being exploited by some. As Michael Gray points out, the DiggBar frames a page and assigns it a Digg.com URL, which can be exploited for SEO benefit by unscrupulous affiliate publishers.
Tags: digg, facebook, social media, social-news, StumbleUpon, twitter
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Discussion on social networks & blogs
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Digg Adds Nofollow To All Stories That Aren’t Popular | AccuraCast Search Daily News : 7 September 2009 at 10:43 am
[...] A number of experts from the SEO industry have been involved in the creation and derision of the rel=”nofollow” search engine robot directive. Digg has had a few run-ins with these professionals and the rebots instruction method in the not-too-distant past when they launched the DiggBar. [...]
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Update: Digg have clarified that they place a robots “noindex” tag in the framed pages, so they will not pose a problem for SEO after all.
Digg also uses the canonical tag and links to the original source, to prevent SEO duplication problems for the source.
“As Michael Gray points out, the DiggBar frames a page and assigns it a Digg.com URL, which can be exploited for SEO benefit by unscrupulous affiliate publishers.” I don’t under how this bar can be exploited? Is the link a nofollow now? It is something like digg.com/adsf78r
If you read Gray’s blog post about this, his point was that you could essentially put your content on a Digg.com domain URL, which carries more weight (digg.com domain), and so is more likely to make your content rank higher.
However, as the update points out, Digg has added a robots noindex tag and the canonical tag on the main page to prevent SEO issues / exploitation.