Diffusing the DiggBar traffic timebomb

By Davey Winder
Thursday, 16 April 2009 04:06

Technology

Ever since Digg introduced the DiggBar toolbar at the start of the month it has come under fire for framing your site content with a custom Digg URL. Has Digg done enough with the latest update to diffuse the toolbar traffic timebomb?

Digg founder Kevin Rose was hopeful that DiggBar would be a useful tool to the site discovery community by allowing users to Digg directly on the destination site, share those stories using a TinyURL-alike shortened link on Twitter, bring comments on to the story page and allow for the discovery of related content in the style of StumbleUpon.

Of course, what he got was a shedload of complaints. At the heart of much of the hostility was the notion that far from creating traffic for online content providers it was actually stealing traffic.

The reasoning behind this argument being that when someone visits your site courtesy of a Dugg link, the DiggBar actually wraps that content, that site, in a custom Digg URL as well as simply framing the page with the toolbar itself.

If you have ever used Google Images to view a web-based photo then you will know the kind of framing we are talking about here. The concern of the vocal minority was that Digg was simply cooking up a whole lot more traffic for itself.

Digg spokesperson John Quinn reckons that in the first week Digg saw "a 20% lift in unique visitors" and, importantly, that "many content providers have experienced similar traffic bumps."

Quinn also wanted to put those traffic stealing allegation to bed, saying "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."

What's more, Comscore and Nielson have both confirmed that publisher traffic statistics are not impacted by DiggBar. Yet still the debate raged, so much so that Digg has been forced into making another official statement.

What does Digg have to say to diffuse the DiggBar traffic timebomb once and for all? Find out on page 2 where all will be revealed...

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