Has anyone else noticed a big change at Digg recently? I've been waiting for a Digg NoFollow headline for a long time given how powerful the social bookmarking site is. At last check, the main page of Digg was a PR8 with a half a billion links to the domain. And it was still giving dofollow links on the main home page until recently.
So what is the Digg nofollow change? Over the last few days I've noticed that when you click on a story in either the main home page or on a sub-page you no longer go directly to the story that was submitted. Instead, Digg has implemented a javascript-driven page preview of the target story. But you are technically still on the Digg site. If you look at the url, it is something like https://digg.com/WjEhlkeu, with a semi-transparent top navigation bar that allows you to select to return to Digg or click through to the target site.
Is this a Digg nofollow in disguise? Are they trying to toe the line a bit here? If so, it's not a half-bad attempt. I guess they continue to maintain that they are dofollow, but put up one more barrier for those who would abuse the site. What exactly is the barrier? Let's get into that.
How does this help Digg?
By putting this jump-off page between the main Digg page and the target story, I believe the SEO juice will not be nearly as strong. As you know, each page within a website has it's own page rank (PR). As mentioned, the home page of Digg.com has amazing PR, and is therefore great for SEO value for outbound links. You used to get a direct like from the site, but not anymore.
So while this is not a full-on Digg nofollow move, it's heading in that direction. We will bookmark a few things and monitor to see how quickly they get indexed. It used to be that a Digg bookmark would get you in the Google search index very quickly. Perhaps not anymore. Stay tuned.