One of those services is BurnURL. The concept of BurnURL is pretty simple: You input a url and it spits out a shortened version that you can then use for distribution. But like Digg, they do not implement a simple 301. Instead, they wrap your page in a frame bar.

Also like Digg, they recently published a “don’t worry, we’re not evil” blog post assuring everyone that they have taken steps to prevent any negative impact on publishers.

We’ve always been a very publishers focused company (both with Readburner and BurnURL) and we intend to keep it that way.  We, from the very creation of BurnURL, wanted to make sure the focus was on publishers and their content versus on us and we’ve put quite a few steps in place to do that.

One of the changes we recently put live was to remove the Sharebar when we detected the user-agents of Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask (these four account for the largest portions of search traffic).  These crawlers don’t need to see the Sharebar (as they’re not going to interact wtih it), so we don’t need to serve it to them.  Instead we feed them a 301 redirect.  This tells them the URL that was burned is the original content owner and it should be listed in the index on that topic.  Our shortened URL effectively gets ignored.

While I am certainly an SEO who appreciates “bot only” technical solutions for SEO related issues, I still find myself wondering how/why the operators of sites like BurnURL don’t understand the “big-picture” issues.

So let me try and explain them one more time.

1. The SEO Value Isn’t the 301 Itself - Bouncing Googlebot through a 301 served from a url Google has never indexed does not generate the type of “juice transfer” people think. The bump from 301 based adtracking/affiliate programs has been on the decline for quite awhile. I won’t go into the specifics in this post, but the short version is that Google is getting much better at figuring out when a 301 is being used as it was originally intended, (moving content that they most likely have already indexed to a new location) and when it’s being used as a bounce.

2. The SEO Value is in the Preservation of the Destination URL - The URLs generated by traditional 301 shorteners in and of themselves are not going to contribute much to improving your organic visibility. But they do play a significant secondary role by making sure that EVERYONE ends up on the URL that the PUBLISHER intended the content to be viewed from. That is extremely important, because it is from that point that the viral distribution process actually begins.

The Bottom Line:

If you are running any type of service that actively encourages the viral distribution of frame wrapped content you do not own, you are a steaming pile of shit. Period.  There simply is no way for you to spin it as some type of “we’re here to support publishers” bullshit. The only reason you do what you do is to gain exposure for your company off the backs of others hard work. So stop being a pile of shit and go figure out how to create something of actual value.

Well guess what? Today is the day. And the compelling topic turns out to be Digg’s new amazing DiggBar.  In cased you missed the announcement, here is the Digg’s explanation of what the DiggBar is:

“The DiggBar enables you to Digg, read comments, find related content, and share stuff from any page on the Web. And it’s presented in a short URL format, making it easy to share in emails, on Twitter, and via other services. In addition to finding it on all outbound links from Digg, you can generate the DiggBar using any of the following solutions.”

Here’s what it should say:

“The DiggBar is an incredibly clever framejacking tool disguised as a URL shortening service. The mass adoption of the DiggBar by the thousands of users who constantly distribute un-digg-worthy content through our most feared competitor, will allow us to generate millions of additional revenue dollars by injecting our ads in between our feared competitor and the destination url.”

Shortly after the release of the DiggBar, in an article about URL shortening services, Danny Sullivan wrote the following regarding the DiggBar:

“Like lin.cr, it does a 200 code. That means the page is actually on Digg itself - they’re making a page with the DiggBar and pulling in your content without permission into a frame. That’s not illegal, but it’s a tactic that died off years ago. It also means that if you use the Digg short URLs, none of the link credit passes to your page. It’s all kept with Digg.

There’s no need for you to give Digg all your link credit. If you want to shorten your URLs, use a service that does a 301 redirect.”

In response to Danny’s criticism, John Quinn Posted the following on Digg’s blog:

“Prior to launching the DiggBar, we reached out to Google and SEO experts to ensure we adhered to the leading best practices, as we framed and linked directly to source content via the DiggBar. This process involved gathering feedback from publishers to ensure the execution was as content-provider-friendly as possible. We took several steps to ensure that search engines continue to count the original source, versus registering the DiggBar as new content. We include only links to the source URLs on Digg pages to allow spiders to see the unmodified links to source sites. These links are overwritten to short URLs in JavaScript for users who have this preference.”

He then goes on to add:

“We launched a few additional updates early this week to address some lingering concerns in the SEO and publishing communities around the infamous (and sometimes mysterious) search engine ‘juice’. We always represent the source URL as the preferred version of the URL to search engines and use the meta noindex tag to keep DiggBar pages out of search indexes. For those of you interested in the technical details, we also include link rel=”canonical” information to indicate that the original URL is the real (canonical) version. Additional URL properties, like PageRank and related signals, are transferred as well. This is recommended by Google, Ask.com, Microsoft and Yahoo!.”

Sound’s great. (But not great enough for Digg to allow it on their site?)

But here’s the problem… Based on everything publicly published for us common folk, plus a ton of personal testing, I can tell you that the claims in Digg’s post are a flat out lie.

Lest’s start with the noindex part .  A page excluded from Google’s index either by robots.txt or via a noindex meta tag will develop juice, but it absolutely does not pass it. For that claim to be even remotely true, you would need to at least use “noindex, follow” (which Digg doesn’t) and from all my personal testing, that doesn’t work either.

Now for the canonical part. (aka RelCan)

From Google’s official blog post regarding the introduction of RelCan:

Can this link tag be used to suggest a canonical URL on a completely different domain?

“No. To migrate to a completely different domain, permanent (301) redirects are more appropriate. Google currently will take canonicalization suggestions into account across subdomains (or within a domain), but not across domains. So site owners can suggest www.example.com vs. example.com vs. help.example.com, but not example.com vs. example-widgets.com

Based on that, the big question is whether Digg is lying or a backroom secret handshake took place between Google and Digg which lead to Google giving Digg preferential treatment by honoring a cross-domain RelCan tag. I have no way of knowing because neither company is talking, but I did notice the the RelCan Digg uses contains a source tag at the end.

Could that be the secret code that tells Google to count it, even though they have been told to ignore the page? Maybe.

But lets explore the idea that Digg is just lying.

Think about it for a moment. You invest countless hours promoting your content. You get lucky enough to make the homepage of Digg, or you hit the Retweet motherload on Twitter. A certain percentage of all those people who see your content are going to copy & paste the link they land on into a blog post. (Thereby generating a link for your site).

Before the DiggBar, (and with legit shortening services) all those links would point to your url. Now, a large percentage of them are going to be links pointing to a page on Digg. Now if you are Yahoo, CNN, or the BBC, that isn’t really going to matter much. You don’t have to spend time thinking about building link equity, because you already have it. However, if you are a newer site struggling to build trusted link equity in the current black hole environment we live in, the mass adoption of the DiggBar is a serious issue.

I will be advising all clients to add some frame busting code to their sites so the DiggBar won’t work for the simple reason that regarless which scenario is accurate, they are both equally wrong.

Hopefully, others will do the same.

Update: 4-13-09

The DiggBar discussion on Twitter has been incredible. Here’s the most recent Tweets.

I am not sure when this feature was added, but I just discovered it thanks to a stumbler friend of mine giving me the tip. (Thanks Roby!)

Basically all you need to do is go to your ‘favorites’ then hover over the image and then a ’share’ button appears.

From there, you can choose what friends to share with and voila!  The days of sending to one friend at a time are over.

Thank you StumbleUpon. Nice!

On another note I wanted to send out a big bloggy thank you to Michael Dorausch (aka @chiropractic) for this very thoughtful gift I just received. 

In case you can’t read the note, this is our hangover kit we need to take to Vegas. Along with gum so we have minty fresh breath.

Very cool Mike and thank you. See you there.

Here’s my tags:

Todd Friesen - Because…oh wait…haha nevermind, I forgot he can’t.

Guy Kawasaki - Because he’s way more viral than that other guy.
Brent Csutoras - Because I finally learned how to spell his name.
Chris Winfield - Because … well just because.
Katja Presnal - Because she is the queen of WOMM.
Neil Patel - Because I’m his biggest fan.

Today is the start of breast cancer awareness month. During the month of October you are likely to see more information about breast cancer than you may have seen all year. The difference is that you can help spread the word by focusing on the topic for at least one month. It’s easy. All you have to do is stumble, delicious, digg, reddit, kirtsy whatever article you see related to increasing awareness.

Help increase the flow of the topic on the web and help save the tatas.

Oh and one more thing you can do.  Turn Twiiter Pink.  Do you remember Green Friday, the ode to @gregboser?

Just imagine it looking like this…

So step up and go pink!

As far as the actual conference part of SEOktoberfest…ehm…All I can tell you about what happened is that I can’t really tell you anything.  I will say that Marcus and Quadzilla were unbelievably amazing hosts.  I mean they were able to keep track of all of us all the time and nobody got lost.  They took us to two elite clubs in Munich (after spending hours in the elite tents of Oktoberfest) and showered us with champagne (literally).    They had five lovely German playmates there to entertain everyone after hours.  We were provided with everything we needed from food, to drinks to the lederhosen and drindl.  I think it’s safe to say this was a non-profit event.

As far as the picture of Greg in the lederhosen, all I can say is I FAILED.  It’s hard to think about stuff like that when you are drinking multiple steins of beer and wearing a drindl. All I can show you is this picture that Marcus has on his blog.  Greg is on the left and you can kind of see me behind one of the playmates. 

Thanks again to Marcus, Quadzilla and Philip for dreaming this up and going through with it.

So with that, I’ll leave you to your imagination.  The rest you’ll have to see if we’re friends on Facebook. Or you can go to Marcus’s post about the best SEO party in the world!! (Bonus: If you go to my Facebook pics, you’ll get to see Dax in his lederhosen.  I managed to get that picture. :P)

Auf Wiedersehen!

Here’s some of the new changes I stumbled upon this morning.

After opening my inbox I discovered this message:

This is new and I like it because it gives you an indication that someone has friended you where as in the past, the only way you’d know is if you knew what the fan number was on a daily basis.

So after accepting the friend request nothing different happened, other than I was curious and started adding people to see if it would let me…and it did.

This is what you see now to add friends. 

SU is also telling you if you have similar interests

So apparently there is a limit with how many friends you can add at any given time.  I got this message after about 15  or so.

They have also changed the name of fans to subscribers and like I said before, the page with your fans subscribers is not updating right away so I have no idea who I added this morning.  At least I know they’ll get a message from me though. 

Lastly…avatars now come with  the online indicator next to them.  Not too sure if I care about that, but I guess it’s nice to know if someone is online at a glance instead of having to look at their page.

I have not found an official announcement and did not find anything on the SU website stating this, but I do know that I’ve been maxed out on friends for a long while and was able to add more this morning.  I hope they leave it like this.  Who needs Ebay anyway?

I just downloaded the browser and will be learning about its features today, but here is a breakdown of what those new features are:

New Tab Page

A small plus sign gets you a new tab that will show you your most recent visits, recently bookmarked sites, etc.

Application Shortcuts

Open web apps such as GMail write from your desktop without opening your browser.  This is really a cool feature and it saves your passwords so accessing your Gmail is now a double click on your desktop.  Nice.

Dynamic Tabs
This is similar to Firefox where you can drag the url right down to your browser tool bar.

Crash Control
This will probably be one of my favorite features.  If your browser crashed Google Chrome will only have to close the tab you are browsing instead of the entire browser.

Incognito Mode

If you want to be stealthy while browsing the web and leave no trace of where you’ve been or what you’ve been up to try this new incognito feature.

Safe Browsing
Google Chrome will alert you if you’ve arrived at a site that may have a malicious intention. (phishing, malware, etc)

Instant Bookmarking

All you have to do is click on the star to the right of the toolbar and voila you are bookmarked!

Import Settings

All of your bookmarks, passwords, browsing history and settings will be imported to Google Chrome at the time you download it.

Simple Downloading
No more download manager window.  The download status will be displayed at the bottom of the window.

The other cool feature is that when you are using Google chrome the Google search box is chrome.

So far so good Google. Thanks for adding some bling to my search box.

What’s missing…Home button and lots of awesome FF plug-ins.

Download it here!

Seriously though it is a big trip and a busy time for us, but the more we found out about who was going to be there and what an elite group of marketers were making their way to Munich, we couldn’t pass it up.  After all it is Oktoberfest and Marcus is buying Greg and Dax Lederhosen.  I’m not kidding.  I suppose I’ll have to get a dirndl (traditional German dress) myself to not look out of place.  Do you think I’ll stand out?  How many Latin women do you think will be there wearing traditional German garb? 

Confirmed attendees for SEOktoberfest are Brent Csutoras, Joost de Valk (Yoast), Bob Rains (Let’s Make It Awesome), and Brian Clark (Copyblogger). So we are super excited and really can’t wait to get there.  SEOktoberfest will be held in one of the most popular tents and we have a private table that will be filled with some of the most knowledgeable internet marketers in the industry. 

So stay tuned because there will be pictures and I was told we need to start practicing drinking beer.  Lots and lots of beer.  So good thing today is Friday.