Much was made of last week’s rollout of the DiggBar on the social news site Digg.com with many people saying it will negatively affect the search engine optimization (SEO) of websites because of its URL shortening capabilities.
But in a post on the company’s blog today, John Quinn, vice president of engineering, says that the new service is actually search engine optimization (SEO)-friendly and has managed to increase unique visitors by 20 percent.
"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," wrote Quinn. "This process involved gathering feedback from publishers to ensure the execution was as content-provider-friendly as possible."
In order to make sure the original sources of the content are getting the credit for the traffic when people click on the links on Digg, Quinn said the company has made sure that the links include the original rel="canonical" information signifying that the original URL is the actual version.
Micro-blogging service Twitter recently made changes to its HTML title tags which was expected to increase search engine optimization (SEO).
