Some not Digging the DiggBar

I think this pretty much sums up John Gruber or Daring Fireball's feelings on Digg's new URL shortener-DiggBar.

"So, shortly after it was announced, I wrote code to block it from Daring Fireball. If you attempt to view most pages on DF through the DiggBar, you’ll be greeted with a special message just for Digg instead of the regular content of the page."

Pretty clear if you ask me...

But let's back up for a moment.

URL shorteners are used by Twitterers and other folks to give you a shortened URL link to follow, rather than a long, goofy looking link.

TinyURL.com is one such service. You paste in a link and it spits out a shorter one that will take you to the same site:

http://tinyurl.com/dh5hhk

So what's the story with the DiggBar? Apparently it frames the URL inside a Digg one that keeps you connected to Digg, rather than cut you totally loose to the link. Here's Wired's Brian Chen with a better explanation.

"Those turned off by DiggBar find it reminiscent of web sites in the 1990s that utilized frames to separate sections. Framing raised a number of issues that ultimately rendered it into a retired design method. First, frames were not cross-compatible, meaning web sites with frames would display inconsistently between different browsers. Also, some web sites used frames to trap visitors inside their sites even when linking to external content, effectively hijacking traffic. Lastly, web designers today embrace clean and simple interfaces, so framing was dropped because it just looked tacky."

Greg Boser of 3Dog Media adds this.

"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."

Boser also points to this Blogpost from Digg's John Quinn:

"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.

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!."

I'm curious how this will play itself out or if it remains a somewhat 'religious argument' amongst those folks who have a higher stake in large volume traffic. Being 'America's Least Read Tech Blog,' any traffic is good traffic to me.

A lot of people go back and forth on URL shorteners, but I have found TinyURL works just fine for me. And i think I just might stay out of the DiggBar for now; seems like a fight's brewin' in there.

Update:

For further reading, more have chimed in on the uncoolness of the DiggBar, including Scott Gilbertson of WebMonkey, as well as Joshua Topolsky on why Engadget is blocking it as well.