Digg Profiles Have Nofollow
Well look what I just found! I was playing around with the new Digg.com profiles when I had the urge to take a peak inside the source. And what did I see? A big ol’ fat nofollow attribute mocking my link. Tell me it ain’t so. Not the democratic, user-driven Digg.
Well, turns out it’s not your usual garden variety nofollow. It’s a “me nofollow,” instead. But you get the point don’t you? The presence of nofollow in the Digg link syntax portends that outbound links will not be carrying voting weight.
There has been much angst over the nofollow attribute since it was initiated. There was speculation that this would occur after Wikipedia added nofollow to their links earlier this year. Since then, many webmasters began adding nofollow to their Wikpedia links.
Does this mean you should add the nofollow attribute to all your links to Digg? I think not. The new profiles give Digg users a chance to add any links they want to the right side of their profiles. Spammers would have a hey day exploiting this feature. Digg would be crazy not to nofollow the profile links. I certainly wouldn’t allow users to create free-for-all links pointing to where ever they want on my site. Would you?
What about the other links on Digg.com? From what I have seen, the news story links are still naked. I seriously doubt that Digg would block these links, since they are so big on crediting sources. Yet, Digg’s spam problem seems to lie squarly in submission gaming. Hmm… Digg, you wouldn’t would you?
Update: I can confirm the nofollow attribute has now been removed from the Digg profiles. Regular hyperlink code now appears. To Kevin Rose, et al at Digg.com, thanks for giving back to Digg users by removing nofollow.
September 21st, 2007 at 9:09 am
The Nofollow attribute forces Webmasters to provide better content in their posts. This way they still get good traffic, but the traffic is legit and not spammed.
September 23rd, 2007 at 5:32 pm
I have to say I don’t think it’s a bad thing. If I got the kind of traffic they did, I’d do the same thing with all my websites. :) Spammers are sneaky, and that’s just too obvious a target for them to pass it up.
September 27th, 2007 at 6:54 am
Yeah - I agree. I thinks it’s fair enough. To be honest it’s entirely up to a site owner whether they want to nofollow any links. After all - it’s their site isn’t it. Digg are just making sure that people don’t create profiles purely to spam some links and hence thats OK by me.
October 1st, 2007 at 10:19 pm
Look for a site like this one, social bookmarking site, i do not think it is fair enough.
January 24th, 2008 at 10:16 am
I checked on the code of digg whether its news links or story links have nofollow attributes, but I found none. It’s difficult to spam digg since the spammer has to enter the verification code first before posting a news link.
January 24th, 2008 at 11:40 am
I would imagine Digg will keep it that way, especially since when you post a story from Digg to your own blog, it inserts a “followed” link crediting Digg on your site.
June 10th, 2008 at 8:12 pm
so this is the reason why almost everyone in the social media backyard is following the “nofollow” in the profiles page…