Digg to Relent on DiggBar

Digg VP of engineering John Quinn on changes coming “over the next week or so”:

  1. New treatment to the behavior of Digg short URLs. All anonymous users, on or off Digg will be taken directly to the publishers content via a permanent redirect (301), no toolbar, straight to the site. Logged in users that have not opted out will continue to see the DiggBar (200). These changes ensure that content providers receive full search engine ‘juice’ or credit for all links on and off Digg. They also ensure that Digg short URLs won’t appear in the indexes of any major search engines.

  2. Because we want to ensure the best user experience, the DiggBar will soon only be shown to you when you are logged into Digg.

This is a fine solution, and once put into place, I’ll remove my DiggBar blocking code. These two points are exactly what makes the DiggBar more objectionable than similar features from StumbleUpon and Facebook.

In the meantime, I’ve updated my message.

★ Wednesday, 15 April 2009