Since we launched the DiggBar, we’ve received valuable feedback from the Digg community, publishers, SEO industry experts and Google. We believe that the DiggBar provides a more seamless way to discover and share content on Digg. Since the launch a little more than a week ago, roughly 45% of all Digging activity is now happening on the Diggbar and over 25% of all DiggBar users are discovering new content they otherwise wouldn’t have by viewing related stories and content from the same source. We’ve also seen a 10% increase in users sharing short-URLs across Twitter, Facebook, email and other places.
Along with all of the positive feedback and results, we’ve also heard your concerns that we take seriously and want to address quickly. We are rolling out a few key changes 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. While the vast majority of Digg users find the DiggBar valuable (only a very small number of users have disabled the feature or hit close with any frequency) we understand that many folks were confused when opting out. We want you to be able to have the option to permanently disable the DiggBar with ease. For registered Digg users receiving the bar, we are also making a few changes to make the process more obvious.
We’re working on these changes now and hope to push them live next week. In addition to immediate changes, we’re also continuing to explore better ways to integrate these tools into the browser as extensions.
As always, we’re continuing to take feedback and evolve the product, so don’t be surprised if you see additional enhancements and updates soon.
Thanks,
John