Social Media bookmarking site Digg is said to be adding NoFollow tags to site links in order to reduce to volume of spam listings in its network. The links which will be directly affected are within user profiles, comments and unpopular posts. The addition of NoFollow tags will mean that Digg will not pass on link juice and page rank to any link which qualifies for the NoFollow tag.

Many Digg users create and submit content to Digg just for the links back to their sites. Quality content will drive high volumes of direct traffic to a website, through the Digg network, but many users are more interested in creating poor quality content in order to generate as many links as possible.

Digg have not explained how popular a link needs to be in order to qualify to have the NoFollow tag removed, the Digg blog announced the change but did not detail the criteria.

Digg have said that they have been working with leading members of the SEO community to come up with an effective and fair rule. No names have been given but you have to hope that this is not a result of pressure from Google.

Article by Creative SEO UK

Digg are to commence rolling out an early beta version of a new advertising platform. The new advertisements will only be available to view by a select number of users as part of an initial trial.

Ads will appear within the submitted content results of Digg and will be very clearly marked as sponsored advertising. What is particularly interesting is the bidding model which has been adopted as part of the trial. Advertisers will be charged a cost for each time an ad is clicked, cpc basis, but unusually ad placement will be dictated by user popularity.

Unpopular ads will appeal lower in the list and will pay more for their position and popular ads will display higher in the list but will cost the advertiser less money. This is quite an unusual approach and we are quite eager to see this working in practise. We will be particularly interested in how a new ad is positioned, within the ad listings, by an existing advertiser and how a new advertiser is positioned, within the ad listings, when first joining the campaign? We would hope that a long term advertising relationship with Digg would also bring a loyalty bonus to the advertiser, but as yet these details are not available.

Article by Matt Blay – Creative SEO UK