Digg just totally killed linkbait

by Patrick Altoft on April 3, 2009

Digg has released a toolbar called the Diggbar and in the process has pretty much killed any reason for website owners to try and promote their sites on Digg.

The toolbar works by capturing the target page in an iframe and shortening the URL, you can see it in action here.

TechCrunch

The Diggbar is going to be fantastic for Digg but no so much for content producers. Basically Digg has turned into a Tweetmeme style service with millions of users already.

The main issue with the new Diggbar is that Digg no longer links directly to stories – they are linking to the shortened Diggbar URL instead. This means that not only do you lose any links from digg.com but you also lose the links you get from lazy bloggers who will just link to the shortened Diggbar URL.

To add insult to injury the Diggbar source code has lots of extra content such as comments and related stories as well as an SEO friendly title so will outrank the original post in a lot of cases.

Finally you will notice that the Diggbar links both to the Digg story page and the page on the source website. Guess which one gets the optimised anchor text?

We stopped using Digg for linkbait 9 months ago, I suggest you do the same.

Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.

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{ 22 comments… read them below or add one }

Fadi 03 Apr 2009 at 8:45 am: it’s like stumble upon but it’s called digg
Steen Seo Ã–hman 03 Apr 2009 at 9:04 am: Interesting stuff.

Digg is not that big in Europe – apart from UK. I’m sure the potential is limited for Digg, when the cut of the content producers like this.
Stever 03 Apr 2009 at 9:07 am: Seems everyone wants to be a Twit and destroy the nature of linking.

Patrick, you’ll want to remove the Digg button from your sociable pluggin.
Patrick Altoft 03 Apr 2009 at 9:11 am
Find me on Twitter: I just have it to look pretty, been banned from digg for years.
More comments from Patrick Altoft
stuartpturner 03 Apr 2009 at 9:27 am: Boo! I’ve never been a major fan of Digg to be honest but this at least gives me a reason to avoid it!
Matt Chatterley 03 Apr 2009 at 9:28 am: Don’t forget – people follow links too.

If you have a story (or other content) which is likely to get front-paged on any of these sites, and bring in attention – then thats worth it.

I’d agree that ‘digging’ stuff as a matter of course is probably relatively pointless, though.
Tamar Weinberg 03 Apr 2009 at 2:37 pm: I’ve been saying this for over a year – why are marketers marketing Digg? Clearly, Digg doesn’t give a damn about you guys.
Kyle 03 Apr 2009 at 4:16 pm: There is a way to remove this, click the arrow in the digg bar next to feedback and click “always hide the diggbar”. This still doesn’t make it a good decision, and who knows how many users will hide the bar.
Chris Bennett 03 Apr 2009 at 8:11 pm: Glad you brought this to light with all the other praise going on about the new toolbar.

Digg is trying to do everything in its power to be profitable and if that means screwing everyone but them on the way they will do it. I haven’t relied on Digg for links for over a year, plus the links I see from SU or Reddit or Twitter users and their blogs are far more quality than 99% of the lazy blogger links you get from Digg users.

I have had articles get 1,000 links just from Twitter passing it around and people finding it that way. We don’t need Digg anymore.
Stuart Foster 03 Apr 2009 at 10:00 pm: Wow…looks like I am definitely NOT going back to Digg. I wish they’d just understand that marketers like using their service too and not just to promote their own interests. The redirect of the link to Digg is extremely shady…
Rob 04 Apr 2009 at 6:58 am: Javascript is your friend.

A standard iframe breaker negates the problem.

4 lines of code.
davet 05 Apr 2009 at 1:49 am: I KNOW!!! It’s almost as though they don’t like being spammed!
Brandon Anderson 05 Apr 2009 at 2:42 pm: Correct me if I’m wrong here, but wouldn’t; bit.ly, tinyurl.com, is.gd etc etc. doing the same thing? No one has brought this up with those services before.

or am I misunderstanding?

All the best,
Brandon
Steen Seo Ã–hman 05 Apr 2009 at 3:00 pm: Must say I agree, I think Twitter will take over in generating traffic to the Blogs. Twitter is growing fast in Europe, and I hope see a breakthrough in Denmark any day now.
Mr. Gunn 05 Apr 2009 at 8:06 pm: Iframes do suck, and Digg sucks worse, but the content has to come from somewhere, right, so it’s not like they’re copying your content and re-hosting it. What am I missing?

Oh, is.gd doesn’t have frames, but there are nasty shortening services like ad.vu that have this parasitic activity.
Tim_Myth 06 Apr 2009 at 2:04 pm: Is there a rel=”nodigg” attribute yet?
Dave 07 Apr 2009 at 7:13 am: So Digg is essentially stealing content and getting traffic off your pages.
PSD Converter Guy 07 Apr 2009 at 2:29 pm: that’s truly amazing that they can do that… it’s almost like hotlinking an image like google images indirectly does… perhaps they’ll see a lack of hot new content being submitted and revert, however unlikely.
Blogercise 07 Apr 2009 at 4:20 pm: I personally advise people not to chase Digg traffic in the first place! Think about who uses such sites and why they are using it. Someone typing a term into Google knows what they want, they have a purpose and a goal, they are necessarily search for something. These are the people you want on your site.

A Digg user is just clicking around and wasting some time, they’ve clicked to your site because Digg has put it up in front of their face, 99 times out of 100 they will have no interest. This is particularly bad if you use eg adsense as Google will reduce the amount it pays you if you are not getting clicks.

I sometimes feel like the kid from the old fable who points out that the Emperor is naked after all! On the plus side, the more people chasing social traffic the less there are chasing search traffic !
Will 09 Apr 2009 at 9:46 pm: Digg is just a glorified scraper site now. I think the exodus to reddit will soon be massive.
Zvi Peretz Cohen 21 Apr 2009 at 7:25 am: I wonder how long it will take the folks at Digg to react to this criticism?
Zvi
Ryan @ Linkbuildr 28 May 2009 at 5:58 am: Linkbait is still alive on and kicking on Digg. I’ve had a lot of my linkbait for clients pop on Digg and benefit from dozens to hundreds of links from other sites linking to it. Digg has not come close to outranking the original post once it has gone hot.