Diggbar, in its current form, is Bad for your Website

In my previous post on removing the Diggbar, I wrote that Digg’s new toolbar may not be that bad a thing for websites as it redirects all the incoming links juice, Google PageRank, etc. to the original source through the use of canonical links.

Unfortunately, that was an incorrect assumption.

Let’s say the source website is xyz.com and corresponding short URL created by Diggbar is digg.com/123. The HTML source of that Diggbar page will then read something like this:

  1: /* HTML source of http://digg.com/123 */
  2: <link rel="canonical" href="http://xyz.com" />

It is basically an instruction to the search engine bots that the original page is located at xyz.com so all the Google Juice should be transferred to that page and not digg.com.

This sounds like a good approach but there’s a major flaw in implementation here. The rel=canonical approach doesn’t work across domains so search engine bots will completely ignore the Digg suggestion. Thanks Matt.

This may be slightly worrying for content publishers because if more sites link to the digg.com/123 URL instead of xyz.com, there are chances that Digg may outrank the original source. However, that is less likely to happen because Diggbar pages always include a Meta NOINDEX tag and thus search engines aren’t supposed to index them at all.

The only workaround that will work across different domains is a 301 redirect but am not sure if Digg is willing to go that far as it would mean turning Diggbar into yet another TinyURL clone.

Related video: What is the rel=canonical element