How to block the Diggbar

The Diggbar, which launched recently by Digg is one of the hot debates in the blogosphere. Some feel it is evil and think that it increases digg experience for digg users. In publisher point of view it is evil in its current form and sites like engadget are blocking it. One of the main concerns is that Diggbar short URLs are 200 http codes, that means the link credit goes to digg instead of publisher. Other short URLs redirect to original site using 301 redirect which passes Google Juice if any to the original source. Danny Sullivan has a good post on this whole diggbar issue which is worth reading.

Diggbar short urls ranking higher than original source article. Credit: Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land

Digg explained in a blogpost that Diggbar is not evil and it will pass Google Juice and since Digg uses rel=”canonical” attribute it will tell the search engines where the original URL is located, but it won’t help because “canonical” attribute won’t work for cross domains ot is meant for same domain URLs. Greg has a good post dissecting Digg’s claims about diggbar.

If you think Diggbar is evil you can block it on your site using javascript. The below javascript will effectively break any site that is framing your content and redirects to the original URL unless javascript is turned off in the browser.

[sourcecode language=’jscript’][/sourcecode]

If you want break only Diggbar, Faruk AteÅŸ has a modified version of the javascript which blocks the diggbar. It will simlpy redirect to your original URL, this is better method if you want to break out of diggbar.

[sourcecode language=’jscript’][/sourcecode]

If you hate those diggbar and block it for all sites there are some greasemonkey scripts which you can install in Firefox. Diggbar Killer and Anti Diggbar

If you are a Digg user, you can turn the diggbar off when opening links by modifying the “viewing preferences” in Digg profile page.