It has been panned by site owners, but Digg are sticking to their DiggBar. This means we have to add workarounds to break out of their URL-stealing frameset.
Thankfully, this problem was fixed back in the 1990’s, the last time spammy sites tried to do this. Lots of code is out there but here are the two best approaches …
Digg obviously love their frameset because it inflates their traffic figures. Whereas before they would send hundreds of thousands of page views to linked sites directly, now it appears as one more click in their stats.
But these people are not looking at content at Digg.com, they are looking at your content.
- They might not realize, because the URL still says Digg.
- They can’t bookmark, because the URL still says Digg.
- They can’t copy and paste the URL into an email, because the URL still says Digg.
- and on top of all that, you don’t get the full Google-friendly link benefit that your site deserves.
Funny, up until now it has been the old media that has had this abusive relationship with new media content producers. Digg just raised the game to new levels.
Now just for balance, Digg does not owe us anything, it is their site, and many people do lust after the traffic Digg sends, toolbar or no toolbar.
Fact though is most sites will never get to the front page where the real traffic comes because despite what the people who run Digg say, it’s not really all that democratic. In fact the big-media owned Reddit is far more democratic for the average user.
So it’s up to you what you do, but if you find your site trapped in the DiggBar, two bloggers have solutions for you:
- Use Javascript to remove the frames, ala BloggingTips
- Use referrer to supply a targeted message, ala DaringFireball
