I’m actually pretty late on commenting on this but it looks like Digg.com has a new nofollow policy in which is supposed to cut down on a lot of the spam. I believe they made these changes at the beginning of this month but how are these changes going to affect us? How are these changes going to affect new site owners trying to get ranked in search engines?
I read somewhere:
“We’ve made a few changes to the way Digg links to external sites that may impact some folks in the SEO community,” says Digg’s John Quinn. “These changes reduce the incentive to post spammy content (or link spam) to Digg, while still flowing ’search engine juice’ freely to quality content.”
Do I agree? Well, of course. But only to a certain extend. I mean, spam takes over too many aspects of the internet so I definitely understand that they’re trying to cut down on the spammers. But there are a few things that worry me about these changes. The SEO for us non-spammers.
How Will Digg’s Nofollow Affect Us?
Like I said, SEO will be affected. Because essentially what they are saying is the fact that the “rel=nofollow” attribute will be tagged on external sites that aren’t exactly trusted. And that includes external links in comments (which is understandable), user profiles and story pages.
Now I agree only to a certain extent on the story pages’ external links. I read that if its “below a certain threshold of popularity” then it would be tagged as “rel=nofollow”. Well, that doesn’t seem too fair to me. If I read correctly then the more popular the story page gets in votes then they would get a “dofollow” tag? That means social users who continue to game the voting system will get more benefits?
Personally, I only use Digg once in a while just to get my new sites ranked in search engines. I know I’m not the only one. But it looks like we won’t be able to do that anymore because our sites won’t be fully trusted. I mean, unless we can manage to get enough votes to get on the front page or something.
And I understand that’s not what Digg is for because its supposed to be a social bookmarking site for news but if SEO wasn’t part of the site and what users use it for then would I be having this conversation to begin with? My point exactly.
Here’s a quick followup from Quinn from Digg:
“This work was done in consultation with leading experts from the SEO/SEM and link spam fields, in an effort to lookout for the interests of content providers and the Digg community,” says Quinn. “As always, we will closely monitor these changes in the wild and iterate based on feedback.”
Well, we’ll see how this goes.
Do you guys use Digg for SEO purposes? If so, what are your opinions?
Well this sure will cut down some spam from Digg.
yap, just more link juice for the people who rank news on digg..always the same guys actually. I wonder if these were the guys that Digg consulted..LOL
I would believe it would affect those members who perceived just to be a marketing tool & not the way of find people interested in your interest & may share your views. Anyways, such people weren’t the toppers anyways! Do you think it would affect the quality content & it’s promotion?
How Digg judges which sites they trust, they don’t say. But one would have to assume that these sites are different from the ones that are straight-up blocked from the service for being spammy. Untrusted links in comments, profiles and story pages will also get the nofollow tag as well.
Digg using nofollow has been a subject of debate since at least 2007, when the service was exploding with popularity. Around that time, Wikipedia decided to use nofollow for all of its outbound links. But what’s interesting here is that Digg isn’t adding nofollow to all of its links, and instead is only doing it for the untrusted ones.
I do know that Digg was started years ago as a source of info and reference for Universities, and the News Networks well that was my understanding of it. I’m not sure how this will change the face of Digg. On another note rumor has it that you are selling DatMoney.com is this true or rumor? Do you plan on starting another blog or retire? lol
Good luck whatever you decide to do. JJ
I’ve never personally used digg for the benefit of receiving SEO benefits, but I can understand where you are coming from. That the “good guys” who are using digg for SEO and have not abused the system are now going to be really hurt by this. It is unfortunate…. but I would say that it is in Digg’s best interest to cut down the spam to their website. The one thing that we don’t have… that they have…. is the amount of spam users, and just how much spam they are getting. Perhaps… the spam % was high enough that they had to take action.
Just some thoughts is all….
Till then,
Jean
I will appriciate digg’s move for this. because digg is slowly becoming like a dump of garbage, the proportion of spam was increasing like anything.
JJ – Yeah, it was true that I tried to sell DatMoney because I wanted a financial backup. But I didn’t hit my reserve price so I decided not to sell and reinvest my time so I can hopefully take this blog to the next level. But I do have a bunch of blogs already anyways.
Jay
digg sucks….they don’t provide much traffic…and the traffic that they do provide is worthless.
it is a great and better idea for digg. nofollow policy of Digg will prevent spammers
It may help Digg administration to stop some spams but it will also complicate matters from the SEO point of view. Anyway good or bad we need to accept it.
I think many of you are placing too much emphasis on Digg. Most of their traffic is not worth that much. So why do so many webmasters cry wolf when Digg decides to censor some of the questionable links?
Currently, Google can read JavaScript that is included on the page, but it can’t touch JavaScript included via external files. By placing your link content in an external JavaScript file, you can rest assured that all of your PageRank will be delivered to the intended targets.
So, let’s say that you have some sites that have been Page Rank “sculpted” by way of strategically applied no follow tags. For example, you may have no followed all of your comment, footer, or sidebar links.
This nofollow policy of Digg may help it to keep away some of the spammers but it is also going to steal the credit that is due to the genuine sites. So I think it is going to do more harm than good atleast to the sites which practice a no-spam policy. I think its high time that Google rethinks its nofollow attribute policy and come up with some thing more functional and accurate rather than this mass anhilation policy of nofollow so that the genuine nospam sites can get their due credit of dofollow links.
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@@Home Education – Its great to hear that Google is now able to read atleast some type of Javascript – thanks for the info. But as far as your mention of PageRank ‘Sculpting’ is considered I must inform you that Google has taken up a new policy to stop PageRank Sculpting. Now Google divides the link juice with the number of links present (sum of both nofollow and dofollow links) – the dofollow links gets their share of link juice but the nofollow ones does not get any link juice but then too your link juice is lost. So there is no point of making links nofollow now as anyway you are going to lose it so better why not give some dofollow link love to all the links except the paid ones.
Digg’s John Quinn has mentioned that – “These changes reduce the incentive to post spammy content (or link spam) to Digg, while still flowing ’search engine juice’ freely to quality content.” But can nofollow links pass link juice? And also how they will judge quality content is at their sole discretion. They must give out guidelines on what they think as spam and what quality content so that it atleast gives the good sites their due link juice.
It is a very difficult job to fight agaist spammers. No matter what we do or prevent they(spammers) will always be there. For genuine webmaster this is a very bad news. But for me it doesn’t effect much as there are many more places to go…
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