Diggbar- Is it good or evil?

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Since Digg has launched its toolbar( Diggbar ) on April 2nd 2009 , there have been a lot of discussions and concerns over the blogosphere regarding it. While some term the Diggbar as an evil idea from the mighty Digg, some people perceive it as a greatly useful enhancement released by digg. There were lot of rumours , myths and doubts regarding this issue. So we thought of clearing most of your doubts through this blog post.

Myths

#Myth1 : Diggbar steals the Search Engine ranking of the website to itself using Digg's high authority

MythBuster : Diggbar doesn't steal any of your SERP's as it includes a rel=canonical tag in the HTML header for every web page shortened through the toolbar.The canonical tag is almost like a 301 redirect and -  if I have my basics known well - so even if other sites link to the short URL by Digg, all the link juice gets transferred to your original page.So this myth is not at all true.

#Myth2 : Digg's shortened URL might get higher ranking than the original source of the content

MythBuster : All the Digg's short URLs carry a NOINDEX meta tag. Hence they wouldn't get indexed on Google or any other search engine and that eliminates the possibility of the above myth.

#Myth3 : The search engine spiders cannot now find the original source via the Digg page which makes the main point of submitting an article by small bloggers go void

MythBuster : Digg includes only links to the source URLs on Digg pages.This allows the search engine spiders to see the links to source sites and follow them. The diggbar links you see when you hover over the links are generated using Javascript and as spiders don't use javascript, the links are not replace in their view.

#Myth4 : You cannot control the Digg bar

MythBuster : Though you don't have the ultimate control over Diggbar, if you are a Digg user you can disable Diggbar by going to http://digg.com/settings/viewing and selecting the setting as shown in the below image#Myth5 : It is difficult to generate Diggbar URLs

MythBuster : It is not really tough to generate URLs. It is as easy as appending the url to http://digg.com/ . Or you can even use the below Bookmarklet to automatically generate URLs

Digg Bar

Facts

#Fact1 : It uses Javascript frames which were considered bad and are being avoided since long

#Fact2 : If you go to some URL from the framed page and want to bookmark the resulting URL, you wouldn't be able to do so.The URL in your browser still remains the old Diggbar URL .This causes a lot of usability problems.

#Fact3 : The page loading time increases significantly as you have to download Digg's resources

#Fact4 : Though an end user holds the control of it, the site-owner had to use some Javascript hacks to disable the Diggbar

Reading on the above Myths and Facts, I think user will be easily able to judge if Diggbar is for him or not.

Tags: Add new tag, Digg Toolbar, DiggBar, DiggBar review