5 ms·

The Truth About Digg’s DiggBar

48 points by muimui 18y ago

poutine 18y ago
If I had a content site I would most certainly put frame busting code on it. To not do so seems foolish. Screw digg.
- nuggien 18y ago
  doesn't frame busting code get invoked too late? i.e. digg already got the search engine love by the time you bust out of the frame?
  - poutine 18y ago
    It does to a certain extent. However anyone re-sharing it will not share the digg URL. Furthermore they're not prompted at the top of the page before your content to leave your site. Digg even sticks ads on the bar when you click on something. Very un-cool.
  - ivankirigin 18y ago
    Others copy and paste the url and send it around - or just use the bar to send it, which does the same.
    - mikeyur 18y ago
      Frame-breaking code redirects the user to the proper url. So traffic may still go to the digg.com/whatever page but it will redirect to the original site.
jrockway 18y ago
What's the difference between browser chrome and the digg bar? Firefox "brands" every page with its logo. (It doesn't use its own URL-space, but it could. What would you do about that.) Anyway, I see why people are upset, but I don't see what they can do about it. It's like ad-blocking... you can't control peoples' experience when viewing your site, it's just not how the web works.
- jrockway 18y ago
  Could someone reply to this instead of downmodding me? This happened in the last article about the Digg bar too. I really don't understand why everyone is upset.
  - jamiequint 18y ago
    Everyone is upset because Digg is stealing SEO juice by jacking the link to your site and making it point to them (and additionally running ads on your site through the diggbar). I think people are downvoting you because this was clearly explained in the article. e.g. if people on Twitter start linking using digg instead of tinyurl (et. al) the person loses all the SEO juice because while tinyurl does a 301 redirect (search engines don't index the tinyurl but instead index and pass PageRank to the actual URL.) Digg does not.
    - jrockway 18y ago
      I don't understand why they think they're entitled to that in the first place, though. It's how the web has worked, sure, but times change. (This reminds me a lot about how VHS tapes killed the movie industry. Yeah.)
      - jrockway 18y ago
        Wow, for a second I thought I was reading HN... but then I realized that Reddit just changed their CSS today. (Downmod me some more. I can lose at most 8 karma points per post, and I have almost 5000 karma. You aren't hurting my feelings, but you are hurting the community by taking a Reddit-like approach to suppressing opinions you don't want to hear. I mean, seriously? I am having trouble making sense of this, as I've never seen it happen before here.)
        knightinblue 18y ago
        What's really troubling is the fact that you don't see how bad this diggbar truly is. Forget the fact that it steals link love (which in the long run will result in stolen revenue), it changes how my site looks to everyone following through the link. For some odd reason, you seem to think that people should 'not' be getting mad because they aren't 'entitled' to how their site looks to everyone. What? P.S. Please don't spout that ignorant bullshit about firefox doing the same thing. It does NOT. If firefox hid site URLs by giving them all new short URLs like www.firefox.com/d1hyfg, people would dump firefox a lot faster than they're dumping the diggbar.
rms 18y ago
Instead of a frame, why don't they stick the DiggBar at the top of the page but then have it scroll off? Seems like a good compromise to me.
- jonknee 18y ago
  Or just use 301 redirects...
  - thorax 18y ago
    Actually, Digg is probably big enough to avoid any penalties for doing a different redirect based on user-agent. I.e. 301 redirects for non-human useragents instead of forcing them to go through their framejacked page. We're actually experimenting with this on tinyarrows, using a full 301 redirect for bots but we test for the preview cookie for other useragents and give them a javascript redirect in that case. We kind of have to do the latter since we support so many different incoming domains, we need a way to test the cookie through a central domain, but don't want to eat SEO juice.
mikeyur 18y ago
The thing that really pisses me off is that Digg struck a deal with Twhirl/Seesmic - Digg.com is the DEFAULT url shortener in the latest version of Twhirl. I'm adding some frame killing code to any of my content sites that have been on digg before. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framekiller http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framekiller
ojbyrne 18y ago
Just a random prediction. It'll be gone, or non-framing in 2 weeks. Digg is dependent on all those sites out there with "digg this" widgets for its page rank, all it will take is a significant proportion of those sites to say "bye digg" and digg will say "bye frames."
zacharypinter 18y ago
The bar is definitely a shady, unneeded annoyance. However, I wouldn't worry too much about it hijacking the SEO for your site by not using a 301 redirect. That might certainly be the case right now, but with Digg's size I doubt Google will let the lack of a 301 prevent them from recognizing what's going on.
- deleted 18y ago
  [deleted]
GeneralMaximus 18y ago
The Digg bar is not just unethical, it's plain annoying. What happens if I want to bookmark the page? What happens when I want to copy-paste the actual URL into an email? What happens if I'm using a text-only browser? What about a mobile browser? What if I wish to scrape my Twitter stream for links and I can't get to the actual URL (this is actually something I'm playing with)? Frankly, I don't see the point of this. This will just confuse and annoy users and steal valuable link-love from content producers.
snprbob86 18y ago
I find it funny that no one freaked out when facebook did this exact same thing: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=43712967130 http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=43712967130 Is it because posted items are used too infrequently for anyone to care? Is facebook's bar somehow useful? There is a curious distinction between reactions.

48 points by muimui 18y ago

poutine 18y ago

If I had a content site I would most certainly put frame busting code on it. To not do so seems foolish. Screw digg.

nuggien 18y ago
doesn't frame busting code get invoked too late? i.e. digg already got the search engine love by the time you bust out of the frame?
- poutine 18y ago
  It does to a certain extent. However anyone re-sharing it will not share the digg URL. Furthermore they're not prompted at the top of the page before your content to leave your site. Digg even sticks ads on the bar when you click on something. Very un-cool.
- ivankirigin 18y ago
  Others copy and paste the url and send it around - or just use the bar to send it, which does the same.
  - mikeyur 18y ago
    Frame-breaking code redirects the user to the proper url. So traffic may still go to the digg.com/whatever page but it will redirect to the original site.

jrockway 18y ago

What's the difference between browser chrome and the digg bar? Firefox "brands" every page with its logo. (It doesn't use its own URL-space, but it could. What would you do about that.) Anyway, I see why people are upset, but I don't see what they can do about it. It's like ad-blocking... you can't control peoples' experience when viewing your site, it's just not how the web works.

jrockway 18y ago
Could someone reply to this instead of downmodding me? This happened in the last article about the Digg bar too. I really don't understand why everyone is upset.
- jamiequint 18y ago
  Everyone is upset because Digg is stealing SEO juice by jacking the link to your site and making it point to them (and additionally running ads on your site through the diggbar). I think people are downvoting you because this was clearly explained in the article. e.g. if people on Twitter start linking using digg instead of tinyurl (et. al) the person loses all the SEO juice because while tinyurl does a 301 redirect (search engines don't index the tinyurl but instead index and pass PageRank to the actual URL.) Digg does not.
  - jrockway 18y ago
    I don't understand why they think they're entitled to that in the first place, though. It's how the web has worked, sure, but times change. (This reminds me a lot about how VHS tapes killed the movie industry. Yeah.)
    - jrockway 18y ago
      Wow, for a second I thought I was reading HN... but then I realized that Reddit just changed their CSS today. (Downmod me some more. I can lose at most 8 karma points per post, and I have almost 5000 karma. You aren't hurting my feelings, but you are hurting the community by taking a Reddit-like approach to suppressing opinions you don't want to hear. I mean, seriously? I am having trouble making sense of this, as I've never seen it happen before here.)
      - knightinblue 18y ago
        What's really troubling is the fact that you don't see how bad this diggbar truly is. Forget the fact that it steals link love (which in the long run will result in stolen revenue), it changes how my site looks to everyone following through the link. For some odd reason, you seem to think that people should 'not' be getting mad because they aren't 'entitled' to how their site looks to everyone. What? P.S. Please don't spout that ignorant bullshit about firefox doing the same thing. It does NOT. If firefox hid site URLs by giving them all new short URLs like www.firefox.com/d1hyfg, people would dump firefox a lot faster than they're dumping the diggbar.

rms 18y ago

Instead of a frame, why don't they stick the DiggBar at the top of the page but then have it scroll off? Seems like a good compromise to me.

jonknee 18y ago
Or just use 301 redirects...
- thorax 18y ago
  Actually, Digg is probably big enough to avoid any penalties for doing a different redirect based on user-agent. I.e. 301 redirects for non-human useragents instead of forcing them to go through their framejacked page. We're actually experimenting with this on tinyarrows, using a full 301 redirect for bots but we test for the preview cookie for other useragents and give them a javascript redirect in that case. We kind of have to do the latter since we support so many different incoming domains, we need a way to test the cookie through a central domain, but don't want to eat SEO juice.

mikeyur 18y ago

The thing that really pisses me off is that Digg struck a deal with Twhirl/Seesmic - Digg.com is the DEFAULT url shortener in the latest version of Twhirl. I'm adding some frame killing code to any of my content sites that have been on digg before. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framekiller http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framekiller

ojbyrne 18y ago

Just a random prediction. It'll be gone, or non-framing in 2 weeks. Digg is dependent on all those sites out there with "digg this" widgets for its page rank, all it will take is a significant proportion of those sites to say "bye digg" and digg will say "bye frames."

zacharypinter 18y ago

The bar is definitely a shady, unneeded annoyance. However, I wouldn't worry too much about it hijacking the SEO for your site by not using a 301 redirect. That might certainly be the case right now, but with Digg's size I doubt Google will let the lack of a 301 prevent them from recognizing what's going on.

deleted 18y ago
[deleted]

GeneralMaximus 18y ago

The Digg bar is not just unethical, it's plain annoying. What happens if I want to bookmark the page? What happens when I want to copy-paste the actual URL into an email? What happens if I'm using a text-only browser? What about a mobile browser? What if I wish to scrape my Twitter stream for links and I can't get to the actual URL (this is actually something I'm playing with)? Frankly, I don't see the point of this. This will just confuse and annoy users and steal valuable link-love from content producers.

snprbob86 18y ago

I find it funny that no one freaked out when facebook did this exact same thing: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=43712967130 http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=43712967130 Is it because posted items are used too infrequently for anyone to care? Is facebook's bar somehow useful? There is a curious distinction between reactions.