Digg.com announced today that the Diggbar was going to have some changes here. Should this appease publishers and Webmasters?
1. New treatment to the behavior of Digg short URLs. All anonymous users, on or off Digg will be taken directly to the publishers content via a permanent redirect (301), no toolbar, straight to the site. Logged in users that have not opted out will continue to see the DiggBar (200). These changes ensure that content providers receive full search engine ‘juice’ or credit for all links on and off Digg. They also ensure that Digg short URLs won’t appear in the indexes of any major search engines.
Since a 301 redirect is done through a server header response and for unlogged users, Google will follow the 301 redirects. Any links pointing to the Digg short URL should theoretically get lnkjuice “if” we believe that 301s transfer 100% of the linkjuice of a page over.
So far the change has not happened, but I will perform a Http Header check when they do this and update the post.
2. Because we want to ensure the best user experience, the DiggBar will soon only be shown to you when you are logged into Digg. While the vast majority of Digg users find the DiggBar valuable (only a very small number of users have disabled the feature or hit close with any frequency) we understand that many folks were confused when opting out. We want you to be able to have the option to permanently disable the DiggBar with ease. For registered Digg users receiving the bar, we are also making a few changes to make the process more obvious.
Transparency is good.
This new method still allows Digg to collect all the data mentioned in my previous post about the Diggbar when logged in users do not opt-out.
It’s a slippery slope to try and get consensus between publishers and Webmasters while trying to falsely inflate your pageviews with Quantcast 
. We’ll see what happens next!
EDIT (April 21st, 2009):
I performed a header server response on the digg short URLs. Header check is returning a proper 301 redirection. Additionally when not logged in, the links were direct (which is wat Search engine robots will see). Glad to see that Digg.com listened to Publisher’s and SEO’s “Valuable Feedback.”
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
“we believe that 301s transfer 100% of the linkjuice of a page over.”
Well, we can all agree that 301s aren’t as good as direct links. This hopefully is just the beginning. They need to get rid of it. It was incredibly stupid to add. Artificially inflate their pageviews at the expense of pissing off many users so a mass exodus to Redditt eventually comes to pass. Dumb. It’s a short term gain for a long term decrease in enthusiasm.
@Will
I wonder how much it pissed off Users vs. Publishers and SEOs. This may have been a way for Digg to inflate page views and they may get away with it. We will see how the Digg community reacts in the coming months.
And by the way:
“we believe that 301s transfer 100% of the linkjuice of a page over.”
is not my opinion, there’s an “if” in front. I have put it in quotes now just in case
Totally nail it about the digg iframe. Nice to see the follow up.
Definitly this story involve a lot of people that all have kind of different goals into that. For me with that modified version it’s seems that Digg “get it” making most of the people (the small and big guys) happy.
As predicted: http://digg.com/tech_news/Censorship_Digg_and_the_diggbar
@oggy, i meant to write the “if” actually. You can put the “if” in the quotes for clarification.
All of these so called changes to the diggbar are bullshit anyway. When I’m not logged in and click on stories, I still get the bar.
@Will I think these changes will be put live soon. Digg’s programmers are probably scratching their heads right now as it will not be an easy task. Once its rolled out, I will do an analysis of their job