Should the new DiggBar be blocked?

Has anyone else been hearing the controversy over the new DiggBar? Digg has been one of the biggest names in blog and website listing sites for years. Most sites now have the share buttons or even a specific link to ‘Digg This’, allowing visitors to vote on a sitIf your article or site was ‘Dugg’ enough, it could result in a flood of traffic to your site. Recently, they unveiled a new DiggBar feature, which looks and sounds great. It provides a bar at the top of the browser allowing you to share content, ‘Digg’ the page your on, even create the all popular shortened url.

The problem is that when your site is visited from a link on the Digg site, it is now hidden within this bar as if the visitor is on Digg. There is no record of the visit to your site, because it was actually a visit to Digg. They simply display your site within theirs.

My question is is this: Is this a bad enough effect to justify blocking the DiggBar (or any frame that wants to hide your site)?

The DiggBar does make it easier for your content to be shared and ‘Dugg’. In the end, getting an article to be extremely popular on Digg, could still generate some buzz and awareness of your site. But is a burst in traffic worth it if the all the search engines are seeing is that the Digg url got all that traffic?

A Look at What Happens

Here is a look at what my recent article ‘An Introduction to SEO‘ looks like when visited from Digg (click to view full size):

As you can see, there are buttons to easily share your content through facebook and Twitter or digg the article yourself and add comments back to Digg.

That all sounds good, right

But you will also notice that the URL is a Digg URL and that is what you are sharing, not your own site. That part sounds really bad and it doesn’t actually look great to have a bar sitting on top of the design you worked so hard on (or paid someone a lot of money to work so hard on). It reminds me of the cheap old hosting services that gave you hosting in return for ads that ran on top of your page.

Plenty of people are blasting the DiggBar for using this method of serving sites within a frame, a technique that has been taboo and looked down upon for years.

Articles about the negative side:

• Webmonkey says the DiggBar is Evil
• DiggBar is Bad for SEO
• Yet another reason why DiggBar is Bad for SEO.

To make it all simple, Digg hides your site from search engines, meaning that all that traffic that might result from the Digg Effect will now go to Digg and not to your site.

Articles from Digg’s Side:

• Interview with Digg Co-Founder Kevin Rose
• Digg claims their DiggBar is NOT Evil

Ways Around the DiggBar

I found a couple solutions to this. One was to display a quick message to any Digg visitors asking them to please click over to the site. But people are lazy and this is an awkward method at best.

The second solution I found was a quick bit of javascript that redirects the traffic to your actual site. This javascript redirect will allow the site to be automatically redirected to your original URL, making sure the visitors from Digg get to your site.

To use this method all you have to do is find the ‘head’ tag in your code. It will look like this “</head>”:

In Wordpress, you should find it in your theme’s ‘header.php’ file.

Then paste this code just before the “</head>”:

<script type="text/javascript">
if (top !== self) top.location.href = self.location.href;
</script>

My Conclusion (for now)

I like the javascript approach and have added it to my site. I think that if someone is visiting my site from Digg, they know how to use Digg, they know to look for that ‘Digg This’ link. So I don’t feel like the easy access to all that sharing in the DiggBar is such a huge benefit to be worth losing all that traffic. Plus, I have the ‘Share This’ buttons that allow anyone who likes my articles to add it Digg it,  Share it, Twitter it, Facebook it, Email it, or do anything else they want with it.

What do you think? DiggBar good or Evil? Or maybe a little of both?