Digg’s Spam Solution

Digg made an announcement last September 2, 2009 that they had made changes on their external links. Digg added rel=”no follow” to all of their external links, including comments, user profiles, story pages, and even unpopular entries. Matt Cutts, a Google Engineer backs up Digg’s idea.

The “no=follow” tags means Digg will not pass the link juice to your external links. This Social Bookmarking site really helped me  to index my website faster and do the deep-link-crawling. I hope this solution will give SEO and Spammers a wake up call.

I prefer Google’s idea (example: Google Bookmarks, Google profiles, etc.) in that they are trying to go for Knol’s strategy which also gives a “no follow” but as the author gains more respect or authority, Google will remove those “no follow” tags from your entries.

However, these giant websites did not give definitions of what a popular author is. Digg only made an announcement (click Here) but did not give a detailed criteria.

I understand Digg’s move in adding “no follow” tags to links. Many Digg users really abuse this feature, even to the point of spamming. The move will result in  search engines giving high quality stories on Digg. Hopefully this can give all of us the best quality content on search engines and other websites.