Digg To Shut Down Its Toolbar, Unban Domains

SEOs (and probably a lot of others, too) are celebrating with today’s news that Digg will shutter its toolbar and unban all previously banned domains. Digg’s new CEO, Kevin Rose, says the changes will happen with the upcoming relaunch of Digg.com.

The DiggBar launched almost exactly a year ago, and was immediately met with criticism from publishers who didn’t like their content being framed, and from search marketers who pointed out that it robbed sites of credit for inbound links. Digg later changed how the DiggBar works in response to these criticisms, but in his announcement today, Rose says the framing issue is why the DiggBar is dead.

Framing content with an iFrame is bad for the Internet. It causes confusion when bookmarking, breaks w/iFrame busters, and has no ability to communicate with the lower frame (if you browse away from a story, the old digg count still persists). It’s an inconsistent/wonky user experience, and I’m happy to say we are killing it when we launch the new Digg.

As for the unbanning of domains, this has affected the search industry for years. Danny Sullivan has written about the uninformed, negative response that almost any SEO-related article gets on Digg from the so-called bury brigade. Rose’s announcement today makes it clear that all content will be welcome on the new Digg.