Hi all,

As most of you have noticed, we launched the DiggBar last week. This cool little feature streamlines your Digg experience by making it much easier to discover and share stories. You can now catch up on comments, related stories and additional source content while directly on the story (no more awkward toggling between Digg and the publisher site). It’s also easier to share stories with your friends on Facebook, Twitter and other great destinations on the interwebs with a shortened Digg URL.

The preliminary results have been exciting, and we continue to learn and make real-time updates to the DiggBar. We’ve seen a 20% lift in unique visitors and many content providers have experienced similar traffic bumps this past week. Digg continues to have a symbiotic relationship with content publishers, and we anticipate these ongoing improvements will only enhance publisher traffic as more people discover and share content on Digg.

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.

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!.

There’s also been some discussion about how traditional web analytics and panel based companies like Quantcast, Compete, Nielson and Comscore track shortened URLs. While we don’t claim to represent any specific methodology, we’ve reached out to Comscore and Nielson and they both confirmed that publisher traffic statistics won’t be impacted by the DiggBar implementation. Also, any quantitative tag employed by Quantcast, Compete and Comscore’s new hybrid methodology will also register the source as the page view.

As always, we continue to monitor ideas and suggestions, so please send them our way.

Thanks,
John