Diggbar is like a virtual toolbar that adds itself to all stories linked from Digg.com (see live example). Digg is also promoting Diggbar as a URL shortening service – just add digg.com at the beginning of any URL and it will create a small address perfect for sharing in email messages as in this example.
I have mixed feelings about the Digg Toolbar but first the good points.
Diggbar is not evil
Contrary to what you may think, Diggbar is not part of any evil SEO conspiracy designed to flow all Google PageRank to the main Digg website. Every web page shortened through digg.com includes a rel=canonical tag in the HTML header which is like a 301 redirect and therefore all link juice gets transferred to the original source even if other sites link to Digg’s short URL.
Second, all these shortened pages have the NOINDEX meta tag so search engines will skip them and that completely eliminates the possibility of Digg ranking higher that the originating source in search results.
Digg Toolbar Drawbacks
That said, there are a couple of things which I hate about the Digg Toolbar.
1. Diggbar renders the main page inside an IFRAME so even if I navigate to another page, the Digg Toolbar will still remain visible on top of that page and worst of all – the URL in the browser address bar won’t be updated.
2. The page loading time increases as browser will first download all Digg resources(style sheets, JavaScript files, etc) before rending the actual webpage. This will be more evident on a slow connection.
3. Diggbar may be acting as a spy as it can easily record my interactions with an external site – they are using the Quantcast tracking code for this purpose already.
4. If you are no fan of Digg, the toolbar adds no value and, in some cases, may even break the layout of some websites.
How to Disable Digg Toolbar
There are two ways in which you can disable the Digg Toolbar. Go to your settings page and select "Never Show Diggbar for external links".
The above preference is only available for people who are members of Digg. If you don’t have an account at Digg, open this page and hover your mouse between the "close" button and the feedback button on the Digg toolbar. Click the drop-down arrow and select "Always hide the toolbar".
Digg uses browser cookies to save your viewing preferences for the Digg Toolbar. That means if you hide the Diggbar in Google Chrome, it may still appear in Firefox or IE because browses don’t share cookies.
Get Your Digg Toolbar back
If you like to re-enabled the disabled Diggbar, simply clear your browser cache or delete the Digg specific cookies. Or, if you have a Digg account, change the default preferences from the settings page.
Find this article at: http://www.labnol.org/internet/disable-digg-toolbar/8133/
Tags: Archives, digg, exclusive, Most Popular, Internet
Reader Comments
Hi Amit – I posted my concerns the other day about the toolbar (click my name). It’s clear that this bar will pump Digg massively and reduce the value of the content site dramatically. The quantcast issue will be interesting to watch as the weeks go on. The bigger issue is that Digg is double-dipping (at least if not more).
Written by Allen on 04.08.09
what about the theory floating out there that digg raises it’s page views and lowers a site’s page views?
The truly best way is to make sure a site doesn’t load in an iframe ANYWHERE. To do that, add the following line of javascript into your header between the and tags -
if (top.location != self.location)
top.location.replace(self.location);
This will bust out any iframes that are superimposed upon your website
Written by Eric on 04.08.09
Nice tutorial..
I was thinking about the SEO impact of new Digg toolbar.. Your insight helped me a lot.
Written by Harsh Agrawal on 04.08.09
Diggbar Killer – Simple GreaseMonkey Script to remove Diggbar – link
Written by Rajiv on 04.13.09
Either adblock plus or noscript disables it, as i still haven’t seen the diggbar. i don’t really care to find out which is doing the trick.
Written by Steven on 04.14.09
One thing you don’t mention is the way that Digg.com steals the traffic associated with the submitted page (and visits from said page), even if only statistically.
This is a bane to any website trying to improve their statistics for a sale or advertiser, for example.
Written by Abe on 04.16.09
I think the canonical tag is intended to work within the website/domain only and is not a replacement for 301 redirection.
Check the comments section of this post by Matt Cutts
link
Written by Shiju Alex on 04.23.09