It seems the buzz around Diggbar is refusing to die and I see more and more webmasters talking about it.

Now here is an interesting thing about Digg, as per them, they are not stealing your content and link juice as they are using canonical tag which is now supported by all major search engines. Now what digg is doing is say if the story url is http://digg.com/d1oRKV it is asking google to not index that page and telling search engines to pass all link juice to that example.com which has the original story.

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<meta name="robots" content="noindex"/>
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/21121.html"/>

What are canonical tags ? - Canonical tags are supported by search engines which are meant to avoid duplication, so if there are two pages with same content on them, you can use canonical tag to tell google and other search engines that this page is a duplicate of another page. Canonical urls were a big problem with wordpress blogs as well as with many other CMS and sites as search engines treat both http://example.com, http://example.com/ and http://example.com/index.php as 3 different pages. That is why these tags were introduced to make the webmaster tell these are duplicate pages.

Now what digg doesn’t know (or may be doesn’t want to tell) is that these tags only work on same domain which means other domains can’t use canonical tag. Check google page about canonical tags to learn more about them. Anyway Digg is using noindex so this means search engines won’t be indexing these pages, so basically webmasters are not getting from this whole setup and infarct they are losing some valuable links which earlier used to point to their stores, now will be pointing to these digg pages which don’t’ pass any page rank and are dead ends for search engines.

It is interesting to know that this will not result in the number of pages indexed of Digg in Google and search engines since digg will maintain a copy of every news story in older format (which you can always access from diggbar too).

Check out Matt Cutts Video about Canonical Link Element

Thanks to Amit for the headup.

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