Digg, the popular social bookmarking site, announced this week on their blog that they are incorporating the nofollow tag (rel=”nofollow”) to external links they don’t trust, with the goal of reducing spam.
When submitting to Digg there are really two goals. One is to make it to the front page which will in turn drive a lot of traffic. And by making it to the front page your story is most likely to become very popular and people will want to link to it, which in turn garners a lot of links to your site. These are both great things for your site and from an SEO perspective, the links are golden.
The problem for Digg is that even if a story does not become popular on Digg, the link coming from Digg itself offers some weight to the spammy URL in a search engine crawler’s eyes. The bottom line here is that Digg will no longer pass link juice on to just any link, the downside maybe that legitimate links, in addition to the spammy ones, may also not get any link love from Digg from now on.
Digg’s blog stated that the nofollow tag will be included on user profiles, comments and unpopular posts, but they made no mention on how popular a link had to be to have the nofollow tag removed.
“We’ve added rel=”nofollow” to any external link that we’re not sure we can vouch for. This includes all external links from comments, user profiles and story pages below a certain threshold of popularity.”
It will be interesting to watch how the rule is implemented over time and see what links Digg deems as trustworthy. The change may mean less link love from Digg but there is no doubt it will provide a better user experience for the Digg community by weeding out the spammers.
