While we liked Digg’s new DiggBar for its features, its release also created quite an uproar in the SEO community. Now, Digg has announced that it will change the way the DiggBar works, which should pacify a lot of Digg’s critics. Among other things, the DiggBar will now only appear when users are logged in to Digg, so that content providers will continue to receive full credit from search engines, without Digg’s iframe getting in the way. Digg will roll these changes out over the next week or so.
These changes to the DiggBar’s behavior, according to Digg, will also ensure that Digg’s short URLs won’t be indexed by any of the major search engines. Just last week, Digg’s John Quinn told us that the company wasn’t planning to use regular permanent redirects, but clearly, the protests over the last few days made Digg change its mind.
For more details about the ‘Diggate’ controversy, have a look at our earlier coverage of the DiggBar’s implications with regards to SEO and copyright.
Lots of Activity on the DiggBar
Digg also announced that an astonishing 45% of all the activity on Digg is now happening on the DiggBar, and 25% of all DiggBar users are using the toolbar to discover new content by looking at related stories. According to John Quinn, only a very small number of Digg users have disabled the toolbar.
