The “DiggBar”

Apr 6, 2009 by Matt | Posted in Social Media 2 Comments

Digg recently threw the switch on their new DiggBar, a little toolbar combined with a URL shortener. The toolbar is really an HTML frameset. Every link on Digg.com will have the DiggBar on top of it when you click through, unless you turn it off. You can also put any page into the DiggBar frameset by prefixing http://digg.com/ to the current URL, such as http://digg.com/http://www.google.com. You will be redirected to the short URL to the page with the DiggBar included.

That’s the controversial part: Every page loaded into the DiggBar ends up with a TinyURL-style short URL that loads the page, with the bar atop it. This means that Digg doesn’t link directly to your site anymore. They link to their short URL (e.g. http://digg.com/d1lGIm), which displays your page in a frame. If someone decides to link to your page, are they going to go through the trouble to break the page out of the frameset and link to the original URL? Probably not. They’re link to the Digg URL instead, which displays your page in the DiggBar frameset. You don’t get any link juice, and the link is dependant on Digg’s URL working.

The DiggBar may net you some more traffic, making it easier for your post to be Dugg and shared on Twitter and Facebook. (Functions for each are included in the toolbar.) I can’t say I like the downside though.

Further Reading

  • http://techzilo.com Sumesh

    To be honest, links don't often come from Digg, so I'm not sure why this will be an issue. From my 3 previous Digg front pages, I've learnt that most links come from Delicious bookmarks when your post gets popular on Digg.
    Also, your ads and stat scripts still load, so there's not much to loose.

    PS: I just lost this comment when I used an OpenID and posted the comment – it lead me to a 404. You might want to take care of that. :)

    • http://intensedebate.com/people/redwall_hp redwall_hp

      Yes, but those Delicious bookmarks would likely point to the digg.com/aabbcc URL instead. How many people would go through the trouble of removing the Digg frame before submitting to Delicious? So Digg gets those links instead of you. You don't have that problem with traditional URL shorteners, as they just do a 301 redirect, but the Digg URL takes you to an actual page on Digg, thus the link points to Digg rather than you.