Digg has a rabbid following. Fans fiercly watchful of their beloved first page, voting up tin foil conspiracy stories, and burying anything they even slightly disagree with.
There’s plenty of sites that rely on Digg for big chunks of their traffic. There are people who can post to Digg and watch their stories shoot up to the top spots.
Knowing their audience, Digg released a “DiggBar” last week that doesn’t even have to be installed. A brilliant marketing idea, but not so great for your site.
DiggBar is activated by prepending a url with http://digg.com/. So a page like this one would be: http://digg.com/http://www.1918.com/how-digg-is-screwing-you-with-diggbar/. At that point Digg will shorten the url and “install” their toolbar at the top of the page. From that toolbar you can either vote for the page, or see comments and do other normal Digg stuff. (read on to see why it doesn’t work on my site)
So what’s the problem? Digg is stealing your content.
Most url shortners, like bit.ly (my personal choice) , TinyURL, tr.im or any of the others, and someone clicks the link, the shortening service does a 301 redirect to the page. The DiggBar does not, it returns a 200 code. If your unfamiliar with webserver response codes, that means Digg is framing your content and taking all of the link juice for people linking to it. So if 2,500 people like one of your pages, but they are clicking a DiggBar link, all of the credit actually passes to Digg. Your site, with your content gets ZERO.
Danny Sullivan has a great post on url shortening services at Search Engine Land if you’re interested. He also shares a quick snippet of JavaScript that you can add to you page to disable DiggBar.
In case you were wondering, the Can’t Fail Cafe photo is by pbo31 on Flickr.
[…] Further reading can be found here: http://www.1918.com/how-digg-is-screwing-you-with-diggbar/ […]