Linked List: April 12, 2009

Clearly Digg Has Thought This Through Thoroughly 

From Digg VP of engineering John Quinn’s description of the DiggBar:

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.

From Google’s FAQ regarding rel="canonical":

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.

(Thanks to DF reader Jakob Egger.)

The Macalope on That Microsoft-Sponsored ‘Apple Tax’ Report by Roger Kay 

El Macalopo nails it: “Don’t waste your time refuting horse shit.”

DiggBar Blocker for Drupal 

Nice work from Henrik Sjökvist.