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Over the last couple of months, I’ve been getting the urge to get back into blogging a bit. However, when it’s been awhile since you’ve attempted to construct a thought longer than a 140 character tweet, actually doing it is a bit harder than you regular bloggers might imagine. I keep finding myself sitting around waiting for a topic to come along that instantly compels me to start typing.

Well guess what? Today is the day. And the compelling topic turns out to be Digg’s new amazing DiggBar.  In cased you missed the announcement, here is the Digg’s explanation of what the DiggBar is:

“The DiggBar enables you to Digg, read comments, find related content, and share stuff from any page on the Web. And it’s presented in a short URL format, making it easy to share in emails, on Twitter, and via other services. In addition to finding it on all outbound links from Digg, you can generate the DiggBar using any of the following solutions.”

Here’s what it should say:

“The DiggBar is an incredibly clever framejacking tool disguised as a URL shortening service. The mass adoption of the DiggBar by the thousands of users who constantly distribute un-digg-worthy content through our most feared competitor, will allow us to generate millions of additional revenue dollars by injecting our ads in between our feared competitor and the destination url.”

Shortly after the release of the DiggBar, in an article about URL shortening services, Danny Sullivan wrote the following regarding the DiggBar:

“Like lin.cr, it does a 200 code. That means the page is actually on Digg itself – they’re making a page with the DiggBar and pulling in your content without permission into a frame. That’s not illegal, but it’s a tactic that died off years ago. It also means that if you use the Digg short URLs, none of the link credit passes to your page. It’s all kept with Digg.

There’s no need for you to give Digg all your link credit. If you want to shorten your URLs, use a service that does a 301 redirect.”

In response to Danny’s criticism, John Quinn Posted the following on Digg’s blog:

“Prior to launching the DiggBar, we reached out to Google and SEO experts to ensure we adhered to the leading best practices, as we framed and linked directly to source content via the DiggBar. This process involved gathering feedback from publishers to ensure the execution was as content-provider-friendly as possible. We took several steps to ensure that search engines continue to count the original source, versus registering the DiggBar as new content. We include only links to the source URLs on Digg pages to allow spiders to see the unmodified links to source sites. These links are overwritten to short URLs in JavaScript for users who have this preference.”

He then goes on to add:

“We launched a few additional updates early this week to address some lingering concerns in the SEO and publishing communities around the infamous (and sometimes mysterious) search engine ‘juice’. We always represent the source URL as the preferred version of the URL to search engines and use the meta noindex tag to keep DiggBar pages out of search indexes. For those of you interested in the technical details, we also include link rel=”canonical” information to indicate that the original URL is the real (canonical) version. Additional URL properties, like PageRank and related signals, are transferred as well. This is recommended by Google, Ask.com, Microsoft and Yahoo!.”

Sound’s great. (But not great enough for Digg to allow it on their site?)

But here’s the problem… Based on everything publicly published for us common folk, plus a ton of personal testing, I can tell you that the claims in Digg’s post are a flat out lie.

Lest’s start with the noindex part .  A page excluded from Google’s index either by robots.txt or via a noindex meta tag will develop juice, but it absolutely does not pass it. For that claim to be even remotely true, you would need to at least use “noindex, follow” (which Digg doesn’t) and from all my personal testing, that doesn’t work either.

Now for the canonical part. (aka RelCan)

From Google’s official blog post regarding the introduction of RelCan:

Can this link tag be used to suggest a canonical URL on a completely different domain?

“No. To migrate to a completely different domain, permanent (301) redirects are more appropriate. Google currently will take canonicalization suggestions into account across subdomains (or within a domain), but not across domains. So site owners can suggest www.example.com vs. example.com vs. help.example.com, but not example.com vs. example-widgets.com

Based on that, the big question is whether Digg is lying or a backroom secret handshake took place between Google and Digg which lead to Google giving Digg preferential treatment by honoring a cross-domain RelCan tag. I have no way of knowing because neither company is talking, but I did notice the the RelCan Digg uses contains a source tag at the end.

Could that be the secret code that tells Google to count it, even though they have been told to ignore the page? Maybe.

But lets explore the idea that Digg is just lying.

Think about it for a moment. You invest countless hours promoting your content. You get lucky enough to make the homepage of Digg, or you hit the Retweet motherload on Twitter. A certain percentage of all those people who see your content are going to copy & paste the link they land on into a blog post. (Thereby generating a link for your site).

Before the DiggBar, (and with legit shortening services) all those links would point to your url. Now, a large percentage of them are going to be links pointing to a page on Digg. Now if you are Yahoo, CNN, or the BBC, that isn’t really going to matter much. You don’t have to spend time thinking about building link equity, because you already have it. However, if you are a newer site struggling to build trusted link equity in the current black hole environment we live in, the mass adoption of the DiggBar is a serious issue.

I will be advising all clients to add some frame busting code to their sites so the DiggBar won’t work for the simple reason that regarless which scenario is accurate, they are both equally wrong.

Hopefully, others will do the same.

Update: 4-13-09

The DiggBar discussion on Twitter has been incredible. Here’s the most recent Tweets.

A lot of folks still don’t quite understand the benefit of having user-generated content on your site. It seems logical to have someone else do the work for you, doesn’t it? They create the content and you reap the benefits of indexed pages, better rankings and more sales…or, in growing cases, a book deal. Below I’ve highlighted three sites that have scored book deals thanks to the content others have created for them.

F My Life

F My Life is a site that allows you to send in a message that begins with “Today” and ends with “FML” (f*ck my life). If your submission gets accepted, it’ll get published on the website and users can vote on it with either a sympathetic “I agree, your life sucks” or a “you totally deserved it.” Here’s a sample FML:

It’s a simple concept, and its success lies entirely upon user-generated content. Everything on this site has been contributed by its readers. It even has an Illustrated FML section where users can actually create art based on a previously published FML (FML fan art — can you believe it?). There’s no reward for contributing other than the satisfaction of seeing your sad anecdote showcased on a public forum. F My Life has a book out that I’ve seen gracing the humor section at Barnes and Noble, enabling you to pay for a hard copy of other people’s misery.

This is Why You’re Fat

This is Why You’re Fat is a site that showcases pictures of heinous, calorie-laden food concoctions sent in by users. That’s pretty much all it is — it’s like food porn. Sloppy, unhealthy food porn. Here’s a sample creation:

People are actually spending time and money to make the most shocking and unhealthy combination of food imaginable while the site owner sits back and lets the submissions pour in. In fact, the webmaster’s even set up a separate URL for the book (bad idea from an SEO standpoint), showcasing a quote from Entertainment Weekly magazine. That’s some pretty nice press considering it’s a book “written” by hundreds of free contributors.

Shit My Dad Says

Probably the most egregious (and hilarious) example of UGC leading to a book deal is the Twitter account called Shit My Dad Says. The account was set up by a young guy who lives with his parents. His dad spouts off hilarious non sequiturs and snarky comments that he’s turned them into a Twitter feed. The profile gained a little bit of traction from Follow Friday, and then someone submitted it to Reddit and it pretty much exploded overnight, gaining over 420,000 followers in less than 2 months. Here’s a sample gem from the account:

The LA Times did an article about the Twitter account and revealed that Justin, the “ghost tweeter” and son of a real-life Frank Costanza, has gotten numerous book deal offers. That’s right, a book deal for someone’s Twitter account. It’s the only example in this post where the guy didn’t even create the website — he’s using an existing user generated content platform to showcase another person’s comments and he’s the one reaping the benefits. Basically, it’s UGC within UGC (holy meta — I think my head asploded).

Back in the day it used to be a bit more difficult to land a book deal. You had to submit a manuscript, know the right people, cross your fingers, and often repeat the process many times until you (hopefully) got lucky. Sure, you could self-publish (as you still can today), but nowadays the Internet has made it easier for publishers to come across a well-written blog that’s attracted some buzz and attention. Writing takes skill, imagination, and a serious time commitment, so imagine how much sweeter it is to get a book deal based on content that others have provided for you. And that’s the beauty of user-generated content.

Here are a few other sites that do a great job with UGC:

1. Yelp — their whole site is pretty much dependent on user-submitted reviews of restaurants and businesses.
2. Cracked — most of their lists that make it on Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon are contributed by their users.
3. Urban Outfitters — a clothing store that allows people to review clothes and merchandise online. Users can see review stats of other people, such as their average ratings, how many times their reviews have been voted as “helpful,” etc.
4. Bleacher Report — the world’s largest sports network that is powered entirely by fan-generated content.
5. Texts from Last Night — a site similar to FML that allows you to submit drunken text messages to be showcased on the website.
6. TripAdvisor — one of the best vacation review websites on the web today.

What other sites successfully leverage user-generated content to their advantage? Tweet your responses to @10e20 or drop them in the comments below, and don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS feed.

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