The Blog Herald

Two Ways to Break Out of the Digg Toolbar

by
April 10, 2009

It has been panned by site owners, but Digg are sticking to their DiggBar. This means we have to add workarounds to break out of their URL-stealing frameset.

Thankfully, this problem was fixed back in the 1990’s, the last time spammy sites tried to do this. Lots of code is out there but here are the two best approaches …

Digg obviously love their frameset because it inflates their traffic figures. Whereas before they would send hundreds of thousands of page views to linked sites directly, now it appears as one more click in their stats.

But these people are not looking at content at Digg.com, they are looking at your content.

  • They might not realize, because the URL still says Digg.
  • They can’t bookmark, because the URL still says Digg.
  • They can’t copy and paste the URL into an email, because the URL still says Digg.
  • and on top of all that, you don’t get the full Google-friendly link benefit that your site deserves.

Funny, up until now it has been the old media that has had this abusive relationship with new media content producers. Digg just raised the game to new levels.

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Now just for balance, Digg does not owe us anything, it is their site, and many people do lust after the traffic Digg sends, toolbar or no toolbar.

Fact though is most sites will never get to the front page where the real traffic comes because despite what the people who run Digg say, it’s not really all that democratic. In fact the big-media owned Reddit is far more democratic for the average user.

So it’s up to you what you do, but if you find your site trapped in the DiggBar, two bloggers have solutions for you:

  1. Use Javascript to remove the frames, ala BloggingTips
  2. Use referrer to supply a targeted message, ala DaringFireball

Chris is a professional blogger and internet marketing consultant. You can get more of his blogging tips, internet marketing advice and copywriting articles and a FREE ebook just by subscribing at chrisg.com

View Comments (6)

  • Thanks for the link Chris.

    I’ve since read that Digg use the rel=”canonical” tag so pagerank juice is passed.

    Personally, the seo link was a never a big issue with me as Digg is all about traffic and not seo benefits (i.e. an article with 1,000 diggs gets one link, much the same as an article with 1 digg). For me it’s about them manipulating how my website is viewed.

  • That’s good about the link juice. For link benefit it used to be you would get far more links because you would get a link from all the profiles who voted, but that was changed. To me it is more about the bookmarking and such, and if they are going to show their ads around my content.

  • you can still book mark the page. the page title has no mention of digg. but the favicon will be diggs, none the less.

  • I mentioned this a BloggingTips, but I think it warrants saying here, too:

    The javascrript interferes with WordPress’s theme preview and activation function. I.e, you can’t activate a them that includes that code in its header.

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