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Digg Starts Nofollow-ing Links That It Doesn’t Trust

techcrunch.com — Digg announced a seemingly small, but rather interesting change on its blog today: It has added a “rel=nofollow” tag to every link on the site that it doesn’t trust. What this means is that all the spammers who submit their stories to Digg, are now basically out of luck.

Who dugg this? Made popular Sep 3, 2009

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  • brandonchicago, on 09/03/2009, -1/+64Just make all stories start as nofollows, and if enough people Digg it to the front page, then it's probably not spam and the nofollow should be removed. Then you don't have to mess with all of that "trusted site" stuff.
  • pwarnock, on 09/03/2009, -2/+39I'm guessing Forbes, Time, et al. are paying for this.
  • yeeaauuh, on 09/03/2009, -5/+39Gee, I wonder why they started doing this...?
    http://digg.com/comedy/The_Racial_Rap_7
  • swagv, on 09/03/2009, -3/+30I nofollow this logic
  • jillkocher, on 09/03/2009, -0/+20Hopefully nofollows will keep some of the spammy garbage out of digg so that the interesting stories have all the more chance to shine.
  • shadowspawn, on 09/03/2009, -4/+21It's not that the nofollow tag isn't for sites that they don't trust, it's for sites that don't pay.

    And with link tracking active now on google (starting last week, every link you click on a search result is tracked and logged, not just your searches anymore) this doesn't surprise me.
  • maximilen, on 09/03/2009, -1/+16They can, and that's exactly what they did. Duh.

    http://blog.digg.com/?p=864


  • inactive, on 09/03/2009, -10/+25what this means is that digg is finding yet another way to control the content of the site. i like digg still. but it isnt the same digg as when i started coming here. more and more i notice the amount of control the sites admins use to determine what makes it on the site. i really think that the only real social aspect left to this site is the comment section. there are still interesting articles on here, and i will continue to read. but to say its a social news aggregator and then put as many controls in place as they do to determine where a story ends up is just *****.
  • pathouston22, on 09/03/2009, -1/+14Digg is a faux democracy. Much of the stuff comes from "diggers" digging 20 links a minute.
  • kap77, on 09/03/2009, -1/+13As best shown by the constant mixing with Twitter and Facebook, Digg has become one of those big names on the web. This makes the content of Digg more susceptible to corporate interests such as the one you just named. This is also probably one reason that roughly 100 Digg accounts are responsible for roughly 40% of everything that we see here.
  • demitio, on 09/03/2009, -1/+13Can someone please explain what the “rel=nofollow” tag actually does?

    edit: I wiki'ed it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow
    "nofollow is an HTML attribute value used to instruct some search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target's ranking in the search engine's index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring."
  • Dweller99, on 09/03/2009, -3/+14You have been here since June.
  • TrevorBelmont, on 09/03/2009, -2/+12Why hasn't this user been banned? Isn't this against the TOS?
    Please folks, bury this article and make sure to mark it as SPAM.
  • dreamache, on 09/03/2009, -0/+9rel="nofollow" is every webmaster's worse nightmare when it concerns backlinks (a link from a separate website pointing to their own) - reason being, the nofollow tag tells search engines that they shouldn't count it as a link to their site - which is negative for the webmaster because it provides no help towards SEO (search engine optimization) and pagerank.
  • bstew22, on 09/03/2009, -2/+10There will always be spam.
  • phaoloo, on 09/03/2009, -4/+10Great news from Digg to clean up the community. To be honest, I'm back here when they retired the shout feature and kicked out many spammers.
  • brandonchicago, on 09/03/2009, -1/+6I believe they are actually just trying to keep link spammers from submitting a ton of submissions to Digg so they can get cheap inbound links. These spam stories only get 1 or 2 diggs and then they get lost in the Digg vault of crapiness. Using a nofollow will negate those links and thus keep those spammers from submitting their worthless crap to Digg because that inbound link from Digg won't be worth anything.
  • JoeHague, on 09/03/2009, -1/+6Wow a Techcrunch article that hasn't resulted in a lawsuit.
    Also it would great if Digg users could chose to add a nofollow to their profile page. It would be nice to keep some of my more, creative comments off of google's radar/
  • Rubuntu, on 09/03/2009, -0/+5from a comment today about the NOFollow in WMW: Google's Treatment of NoFollow Links is Self-Defeating.

    I have a website that has gradually acquired more than 100 natural links from various forums and social bookmarking sites. The site got these links because its purpose is to promote a particular social cause, and people sometimes cite one of its pages to support their own arguments for the same cause.

    The problem for me is that nearly all of these links have a nofollow tag. Thus, even though they are "natural" links created by other people without my involvement, Google doesn't give the site any credit for them.

    So in this case it appears to me that Google has negated the effect of its own original idea of using naturally-acquired links as a measure of the quality of a site's content. In fact, considering the web as a whole, I would guess that Google is disregarding millions of naturally acquired links because they have a nofollow tag.
  • underlord2, on 09/03/2009, -0/+4it isn't your first account? why?

    because you were BANNED.
  • chockster, on 09/03/2009, -1/+5That's not the fault of Google, it's the fault of the sites that make those nofollow links.
  • palmer, on 09/03/2009, -0/+4What do you think happens now? When have you seen blatant spam get to the front page?

    In other news, posts from blogspot.com drop 90%.

    Now if they could just reject the hordes of Microsoft shills that bury any mildly anti-Windows comment with hundreds of downmods.
  • inactive, on 09/03/2009, -2/+6They aren't controling the content. You can still spam your ***** here all you want. Digg was never intended to help ***** blogs get a few Ad Sense bucks.
  • MisterGreen, on 09/03/2009, -0/+3So you see a nofollow on the Techcrunch link above? I don't.
  • wolfing, on 09/03/2009, -2/+5just put nofollow on everything.
  • MisterGreen, on 09/03/2009, -1/+4Thank you for stating the obvious solution to this problem. I don't know what Digg is thinking, what you just said makes 1000 times more sense.
  • simpleid, on 09/03/2009, -0/+3The problem is the community has a very weak voice, over-powered by a subset of extremely dedicated power users. The system you're supporting already vanished through exploitation, the mechanisms in place only offer the illusion of what used to represent a 'truer' social networking news thingy. The ideology is gone, and now comes the swarm of controls to attempt to curve the extreme nature of exploitation taking place already.

    It's turned in to a power struggle among the top 0.001% of users and designers of the system for control of the flow of information, the general user might* get lucky and make it to the front page every now and then.

    Digg used to be a free lancing journalist, and a couple years back picked up and groomed by larger influencer's. It's too late to be changed, a new source would have to be created to give back power to the typical user... but every such tool will eventually be exploited again.
  • inactive, on 09/03/2009, -1/+4uh i have been here a ***** ton longer than that. this isnt my first account. smart ass.
  • Otto, on 09/03/2009, -0/+3Blogspot and WordPress use subdomains. Google is smart enough to take that into account.
  • cplusplus, on 09/03/2009, -1/+4While were are meta-commenting about digg...
    I wish these new paid "stories" like "Do You Miss Saved By The Bell?" were show to be sponsored more obviously.
    Different colors, or something.
  • inactive, on 09/03/2009, -1/+4i agree, but my understanding of digg has always been that its a SOCIAL news aggregate, not a controlled by kevin rose's wallet news aggregate.
  • Angostura, on 09/03/2009, -0/+2It's a message to Web crawlers such as Google's index engine not to follow a link. Why's it important? One of the best ways to increase your position on Google's search results is to get lots of other high-ranked site to link to your site.

    So, people who want to improve their search placement have an incentive to get their sites linked to from Digg irrespective of whether or not they are Digg-worthy.

    By using nofollow Digg is removing one of the incentives for spammers to submit rubbish to the site.
  • Paulish, on 09/03/2009, -0/+2I don't see how this controls what is submitted or what goes on the front page beyond discouraging people who have intentions other than wanting to share good information/articles.
  • bmcnally, on 09/03/2009, -0/+2nofollow means that the links don't count towards something like PageRank. It's saying "I won't vouch for these sites, and I don't want to be punished if they turn out to be selling knock-off Viagra". (which is what they say in their blog post)
  • skelooth, on 09/03/2009, -2/+4Well, that sucks for the websites that get digged. Maybe Digg would prefer websites focus their 'social media' elsewhere?
  • DaviDTC, on 09/04/2009, -0/+2I liked this submission, but I didn't understand why he didn't care. Now it makes sense.

    http://digg.com/people/DAMN_Youtube_doesn_t_recogn ...

    Digg should also warn the users who were digging most of his submissions. With all those friends he has, you can expect any digg he was getting was due to blind digging.
  • cosmiccarl, on 09/03/2009, -0/+2diz sux!!!
  • str3ama, on 09/03/2009, -5/+7This is actually quite stupid, it means that sites like blogspot and wordpress could easily be tagged with nofollow because of the sheer amount of spammers using these services. It's a really bad move and to be honest I doubt we'll see a penalization on more popular sites that are spamming Digg's frontpage (I'll refrain from naming names). Either add no follow across the board for all sites, or simply let the community decide what's spam and what's not.
  • paradigmxx, on 09/04/2009, -0/+2Bye bye Google juice.
  • adeelarshad82, on 09/03/2009, -0/+1@Otto Even if thats the case.... it's not a matter of trusted vs untrusted sites who get followed or unfollowed. Its just that they follow link in certain sections and don't follow in others
  • musicbear, on 09/04/2009, -0/+1The could allow the community its voice back, but they choose not to, or at the very least do not have the will / talent to do so. The idea of digg was lost once the social aspect was worked into it. To not think it wouldn't become a haven for spammers and for special interests to manipulate was just really a lack of foresight on Digg's part. The only way to really get the original user submitted "idea" of digg back would be to take the user names off submissions, take out any social aspect, allow only one submission a day from any account and maybe limit the number of articles to be dugg from any account in one day. They also need to allow the users to be able to ban websites and other users as they choose from showing up in their feeds. They may even need to change the front page to where you can only see when registered, and once registered you would have to pick and choose the content you want to see and create essentially your own digg front page that may look nothing like any other digg front page. While they are at it, they should probably (partner with and) scrape the major news sites and force the legitimate top stories direct from the sources to the front page and drop any user submitted duplicates.

    I don't doubt that some of the things they don't "just fix and be done with it" are because of financial considerations received from special interests and those who back power users. If that's not the case then they really need to just consider starting over with some craftier engineers and a new implementation.

    I guess not everything really needs to be social. I would use digg a lot more if it weren't even as minimally social as it is. Just the fact that over legitimate news stories cute cats at a blog may pop up on the front page because of some spammers / power users gaming the system makes digg a bit of fail at being social and being a news gathering site.
  • MelvinSchlubman, on 09/04/2009, -0/+1Use McAfee siteadvisor: http://www.siteadvisor.com/
  • TommyBoy919, on 09/03/2009, -0/+1I just checked my corporate account (we don't just post our own content, but also industry and tech-related items) and the nofollow criteria seems to be totally random. None of the more self-serving links (posting our own content, articles, etc.) got the nofollow tag, but about 1/3 of the posts to industry blogs, newsletters, etc. did get the nofollow tag.

    Digg is just getting worse and worse. They need some changes at the top. I don't think their leadership has what it takes to keep Digg on top any longer.
  • inactive, on 09/03/2009, -0/+1No duh. But if a bot crawls it, sometimes you still get credit for the link. Yahoo doesn't give a ***** about nofollow
  • xt0ph3r, on 09/04/2009, -0/+1Well, actually, I trust his links quite a bit. I don't really give a ***** about the whole power digger ***** argument, but I do realize he's posting stuff that's not linkbait.
  • FLarsen, on 09/04/2009, -0/+1No.

    There's a lot of legitimate comments with several links in them and it would suck to have users banned for that. Look at Disgod's comment here for instance: http://digg.com/general_sciences/What_s_wrong_with ...
  • xt0ph3r, on 09/04/2009, -0/+1So? There will always be crime, but that doesn't mean we don't need the police still.

    Better police might be nice, but still.
  • hufman, on 09/03/2009, -0/+1It only started last week? What have they been doing on their invisible redirect pages on every search result for the last 3 years?
  • TommyBoy919, on 09/03/2009, -1/+2Sorry, but that is a ridiculously incorrect statement. If you honestly believe this, you don't understand SEO at all.
  • philz, on 09/03/2009, -1/+2What about automatic ban for those who post 100 links in one comment?
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