Digg is desperate or something, because they’re going out of their way to grab as many pageviews as possible while doing the absolute least that actually benefits the writers and publishers of the content. The latest step is to add nofollow attributes to all of the outbound links contained in upcoming story headlines, user profile pages, and even comments that include links (whether or not they’re relevant to the story.)
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Lazy Solutions Don’t Stop Spam
Nofollow doesn’t stop spam – this isn’t even up for debate. We’ve seen this attribute floating around for years and I can promise you that the bots who drop constant loads of link trash do not seem to care about the status of their links. The fact is that the worst spammers are automating their efforts or hiring people who get paid by quantity. The last thing on an annoying spammers mind is how the link will be received or what effect it will have – such concerns are irrelevant to the link spammers who crank out thousands of hyperlinks in a day or week.
Framing and Link Shortening
The biggest problem is obvious – Digg is still framing the content of submitted websites and going on to encourage users to link to the framed version. So not only will they deny a link to the source, they are trying to collect links to their scraped version of the original content. Suggesting as much isn’t some conspiracy, its a frank analysis of the link flow before and after the recent changes.
Break the Frames
The good news is that its easy for webmasters to protect their sites and content from this round-about version of plagiarism. A few extra lines of code can prevent an external site from framing your content. If you want to see how its done for WordPress, read here and check out the link to the available plugin.
At least I have no Reason to Go Back..
I’m going to sound like a Reddit fanboy, but I’ve always kind of hated Digg. Call me an elitist or whatever, but the level of discourse there is pretty low. While some people invested a lot of time into building up networks and getting their content noticed, a lot of those users got randomly banned. Is there any value to the site, for webmasters? In short, I would say no. Find something better to do with your time like write a new post or take a walk with the dogs.
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