You'll have noticed that Digg has recently added the Digg-bar as a central feature, if not the main feature of their social media website. TechCrunch's discussion has a good range of comments from all sides. Having read a few such discussions, used Digg and developed a frames jail-break plugin to release my pages from Digg's grip, I thought my first YOUmoz post was due with my reflections on the use and abuse, hits and misses of the Digg-bar.

Here I'm going to look at:

• what the Digg-bar is and how it works
• benefits of keeping the digg bar
• unfavourable features
• how to remove the Digg-bar from appearing on your website
• other considerations

Digg-bar: What it is and how it works

The Digg bar is at once a URL shortener (like tinyurl.com, bit.ly or ow.ly, for example), a "Digg this" recommendation tool, a form of content suggestion service (like stumbleupon), and crucially for Digg a means to keep user on their website and serve adverts to them, no matter how far they stray from Digg and the stories Digg directly links to.

Technologically, Digg-bar is a small outer-page that house an IFRAME "jail" into which all content linked from Digg is sent. Javascript is used to allow the Digg-bar to remain relatively small (46px high) in standard mode and then expand-on-click (325px) for user interaction. Digg-bar is fixed to the top of the browser window as you can see in the screenshots. Content is linked with a shortened URL, e.g., http://digg.com/d1o9FP is a link to a BBC article about a meteorite. The parent frame has a meta description and title formed from the Digg submission's description and title.

Note that the outer frame cannot, by design, access your child frame to follow where you go. It can (at your request) load other links into the "jail." This means that the Digg-bar remains at the original Digg story until you use the Digg-bar itself to navigate elsewhere.

Benefits

The Digg-bar is actually quite useful from a user's perspective. It offers a quick way to move around Digg viewing stories, allows pages to be seen alongside comment threads (as comments are one of the services that use the expanded bar), and provides related information about the subject matter you are viewing. It also offers quick links (that open new browser windows) for Facebook and Twitter so you can share easily with friends. You can even do URL shortening just by adding Digg.com/ in front of any web address (try it!). If you don't like the bar, you can hide it with a single click. Hovering over some of the Digg-bar links (e.g., bury) gives a medium (88px) height bar. Hovering over the close link (X, top-right) gives a drop-down link that then shows the "Always hide the toolbar" link - this is available in your settings on Digg too and actually removes the bar completely rather than "hiding" it.

What's not to like!

From an SEO/SEM perspective, the benefit of the Digg-bar comes in users being able to more easily digg your pages up through a familiar interface. Users are spending more time on Digg, so there's more chance that well promoted content on Digg will attract eyeballs. There may even be some blackhat benefits for building up trust on your spammy pages.

Unfavourable features

Well. From a user perspective, you're losing a reasonable piece of real estate from the top of your browser and quite a lot of control of where you surf to (though many won't notice that) -- it's akin to the forceable insertion of a toolbar. The URL shortening service relies on Digg's servers, so when Digg is slow your experience will be degraded too. Other than that, it's mainly win for the user.

Content providers should be up in arms. When frames first became popular, there was quickly a moral refactoring that showed (including in the courts; see, for example, this page discussing a number of the more prominent cases, or a more US centric page) that linking someone else's content in a way that presented it as originating from your own website was contrary to good order (copyright, trademarks, etc.). Digg is branding all web content they link to as their own, not only with the Digg logo, but also with a Digg "<abbr title="Uniform Resource Locator; i.e., the address from your browser's address bar">URL</abbr>". Digg is also applying advertising to your content in the most prominent position.

Lastly, what specifically are the SEO issues (and I'm sure I've missed a deal that you'll all fry me for)? Well, Digg is no longer passing users on to your content in its native form; they're being presented with a different URL. They will link to Digg's rendering of your content, with their ads, their follow-on content, their recommendations, and perhaps crucially what amounts to a great big exit sign front-and-centre above your content. As for link juice? It's not your content that's being linked any longer, it's Digg's window on your content (what will Google et al do about this?).

How to remove the Digg bar

You'll want to ask "Should I?" first. I can see benefits for those who use Digg regularly to court visitors and, more specifically, those who aren't trying to directly lead people to a sale (brand building, etc.). It's too early to make a quantitative analysis, but if Digg's bar is doing bad things to your / your client's revenue, you can use the same frame jail-breaking javascript as was used back in the day:

// when your page loads

window.onload = function() {

  // if the top frame isn't your document  

  if (top.location != location) {   

    // write your documents address as the top (i.e., outer) frames address    

    top.location.href = document.location.href ;  

  }

}

More on this digg-bar frame breaking code, when and where it works, when you shouldn't use it, and a Wordpress Plugin for it on alicious.com.

Other considerations

If you're running a site with lots of links out or a URL shortener (Ow.ly at least does this, bit.ly claims the moral high ground and denounce content framing), this is a fantastic way to keep visitors under your control and increase the apparent worth of your site (VC, anyone?) whilst maximising advertising opportunities.

You've only got all your visitors to lose!