It’s About the URLs

Greg Boser on the DiggBar, and why it doesn’t matter whether Digg-framed pages still get indexed accurately by search engines:

Before the DiggBar, (and with legit shortening services) all those links would point to your URL. Now, a large percentage of them are going to be links pointing to a page on Digg. Now if you are Yahoo, CNN, or the BBC, that isn’t really going to matter much. You don’t have to spend time thinking about building link equity, because you already have it. However, if you are a newer site struggling to build trusted link equity in the current black hole environment we live in, the mass adoption of the DiggBar is a serious issue.

Framing breaks bookmarking, it breaks copy-and-paste from the location field, it breaks your browser history, it breaks bookmarklets. There’s nothing OK about it.

★ Friday, 10 April 2009