I couldn't help but notice your site has a small technical issue. It's no biggie, but I think fixing it could save you some money. I'm all about saving people money, just the other day I handed out coupons for a free trial-sized bag of bean-lard mulch. I know, I'm practically a saint.
I noticed that digg can be reached through both https://www.digg.com and https://digg.com. I don't know if you're aware of this, but some of the cool kids are redirecting requests for the www version of their site to the non-www version. Why would they do such a thing? Aside from appearances, they're probably doing this because having a single, canonical version of every URL on your site improves your rankings at search engines.
According to Google employee Matt Cutts:
Q: What is a canonical url? Do you have to use such a weird word, anyway?I know what you're thinking: "I'm Digg, What do I care about improving rankings at the search engines? My value is based on user generated stories and community! Not ranking well in that list of ten little blue links when someone searches at google won't cause my downfall!"
A: Sorry that it’s a strange word; that’s what we call it around Google. Canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices,
....
Q: So how do I make sure that Google picks the url that I want?
A: One thing that helps is to pick the url that you want and use that url consistently across your entire site. For example, don’t make half of your links go to https://example.com/ and the other half go to https://www.example.com/ . Instead, pick the url you prefer and always use that format for your internal links.Q: Is there anything else I can do?
A: Yes. Suppose you want your default url to be https://www.example.com/ . You can make your webserver so that if someone requests https://example.com/, it does a 301 (permanent) redirect to https://www.example.com/ . That helps Google know which url you prefer to be canonical. Adding a 301 redirect can be an especially good idea if your site changes often (e.g. dynamic content, a blog, etc.).
I agree, your future doesn't depend on it - but I'm just trying to save you a few bucks. Remember the bean lard mulch?
I recently heard someone describe Google as "the new https://" - meaning Google has become the new precursor to information discovery online. Right now searching at Google for many phrases returns a mixture of www and non-www versions of Digg pages. While plenty of these pages rank well, having a canonical version could potentially make them rank better. Wouldn't you prefer it if you showed up in the number 1 spot in the search results instead of 5 or 6? The difference in click-through rates for the top three versus 4-10 are incredibly substantial. Click-throughs from Google mean more visitors to Digg from a broader audience. This audience might be inclined to click on some of your ads, meaning more money in your pocket.
You could sign up for Google Sitemaps and select which version of your site is the canonical one, but there's an easier way. According to netcraft you appear to be running Apache, so you could easily fix this canonicalization problem with three lines of code in your configuration file:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^digg\.com
RewriteRule ^/(.*) https://digg.com/$1 [R=301,L]
Simple enough, right?
Sincerely yours,
Matthew Inman
SEOmoz.org
Truly, Matt, you ARE a saint!
If I was Digg, I would:
If they send me a digg t-shirt I'm going to go to bury it in the backyard. Maybe plant a few tulips on top.
It's the principle of the matter, damnit.
A gift to ease your pain?
hahaha, that's awesome
LOL. Awesome.
Matt,
I got here via digg and found this post to be quite informative. Ya learn something new everyday. I'm *running* to implement these three lines of code on my host. I think this will improve some already great rankings on Google.
Thanks!
P.S. I know all too well about the digg crowd. I gave up stressing about the community there -- e.g. seeing my own article submissions ignored in favor of more popular blogs covering them, killing an effort to prevent my Kevin Rose interview from reaching the front page, etc., etc. Yeah, I know ALL too well.
Unfortunately, I know all too well about this story...
Digg.com Duplicate Content Issue…https://www.thegooglecache.com/?p=39 August 21, 2006
I tried to convince them as well but, alas, they were not interested then either.
rjones - nice! You should submit yours to digg, too. Maybe with two of them going up they'll actually take our advice.
Yeah, that sounds likely :P
Damn, they buried it :(
Rule number 1, don't expect an SEO article to do well on Digg. Rule number 2, don't give Diggers SEO tips. :-)
It's a great suggestion, but they're too anti-SEO to care.
Yeah, I kind of half expected it to get buried.
Fortunately we still had over 3,000 uniques from the short time it was on the digg homepage. Hopefully enough people saw it to make an impression.
LOL, good call.
Ya, You are right WebGeek.
It is like democracy. Digg user want top results based on their voting power. They feel that SEO are always spammers who always try to trick search engines and alogirthm. They play against the guidelines but this is not the fact.
Regards
imBuntu
Directory Maximizer
Manual Directory Submission Services
I still don't get what this means... "they" buried it.. Who are they? Digg or the digg users? Does one bury from one user doom the article? Is there an "Intro to Digg" article I can read about this?
Usually the digg staff buries stories relating to or criticizing digg, although the digg community could have buried it as well.
If you keep the "www" out you can usually bump up the font a size when the domain is in print.
Matt, great post! I can't believe they don't have this in their .htaccess. This is one the first things I do with a site to standardize how it gets listed. I usually force the www version instead of non-www, but that's just personal preference.
I like the www versions, too. I always think they look more complete. Does that make me a total simpleton?
Whenever I first type a URL I never bother with the www. As far as I'm concerned I shouldn't have to.
I also recall reading somewhere (sorry, can't remember where) that in Sir Tim's original plan there would be no need for the www.
I usually do the same thing. I like the non-www for the purpose of speaking it aloud, like, "you can check our my site at netexperienced.com" versus www.netexperienced.com. That extra www becomes annoying to repeat and when giving people instructions, it is more fluid to communicate without saying it.
Sadly, Diggers don't like being wrong.
Ever tried to tell someone who's from the North Carolina Bible Belt that maybe there's a different view on Christianity that's correct?
That's the same as talking SEO to Diggers.
Ruddy morons, the lot of them...
It really is a shame that they hate us so much.
Meh, they're just Diggtards. Hey Seattleites: they're the Ave Rats of the internet!
Ha! Too funny.
LOL...Is it just me, or is there an SEOmoz trend toward adding "tard" to the end of words? Starting with Rebecca's comment about her "techtarded" family. I guess that means you could create words like: webtard, designtard, seotard, etc. :)
Free SEO advice? You should make them pay!
I also pointed this out on my blog last year, too.
It's such a simple thing to manage for some cool improvement - it's a no-brainer. They really should set themselves up for one primary domain.
Matt if it means anything, they're not loving my comment defending you either.
You had to know though, that trying to teach Diggers something about SEO wa going to fall on deaf ears. Anti-seo or not it'll be interesting to see if the tips are implemented by Kevin Rose.
Now that would be interesting and would make a good follow-up post: "Hypocritical Diggers hate SEO, yet still take free advice!" :-)
Andy, I like the title for the follow up post. We should all start watching Digg to see if the advice here is taken and they resolve the canonical issue.
Great moral dilemma... do you take advice tha can benefit you from those that you oppose?
I'm sure if it is implemented there will be some other source for justification.
In all fairness to Kevin Rose, I'm not sure he personally is against SEO. I've always thought it was more the community.
Digg could fix the canonical issue and most of the diggers who you would expect to complain would never notice. If you read some of the comments about this post over there it's very clear many diggers are completely clueless about what Matt was saying here.
identity,
10 bucks says they do implement it. :)
No thanks.
I'm sure they will too. Probably just something that has never been caught or thought about before. ;)
Besides, I'd agree that it is probably more user base driving the sentiment than anything else.
Hey Matt,
Really good idea and good post. It shows how the digg community is in the complete dark about SEO and shows their ignorance. I swear they wish they where SEO's thats why they hate us so much.
Their mentality is to bury anything seo related and since the majority of the digg community probably does not feel the same BUT a small percentage of top digg users run digg like a monopoly they can bury great post's like this.
Digg = communist
Thanks top digg users for telling all of the digg community what they should and shouldnt read you commie's.
Digg strong. Matt puny and weak. Digg all knowing. Digg bury Matt.It always makes me laugh how, for every ten negative Diggtard comments, our posts get dugg twenty-five times.
Perhaps its the controversy.
I cannot help but think that these diggers who called out SEO's are doing this on purpose to cause a viral digg sensation.
Either way its good for diggers and SEO's alike.
With Neil from pronet advertising giving a challange to jason calacanis i think it will really help quite some of the noise about SEO's.
There are a lot of Good SEO's out there.
Nice comparison Jane.
I'd go with:
Matt - grown-up. Digg - bunch of kids in a playground, fingers in ears chanting "na nan nanananan can't hear you!"
Dude, I'm sorry but this is hilarious. Giving really good advice for free to a site that needs it still gets creamed by the community.
Great post Matt.
And FYI for all those who read SEOmoz, all you need to do to cannonicalize YOUR home page is to take Matt's script and change "digg.com" to "yourdomain.com" - very simple yet powerful SEO tactic that for some reason people still forget
If digg was on fire and we offered to put them out they'd probably shout
WE DON'T NEED YOUR FREAKY SEO FIRE EXTINGUISHER
PLEASE... Do not feed the animal. The last thing I need is Digg ranking higher in my SERPS. So let's keep the ultra super secret 301 sauce to ourselves please ;)
I'm surprised digg.com, being tech savvy, wouldn't implement this in the first place... I didn't know keeping a consistent url naming is something only SEO's know about...
I know i write the comment to late but,
did you notice that they have already made a 301 redirect www to non-www ?!
Hey there,
I found this article via Digg. I think the fact that there is a virtual (pun intended) war goin on between the two circles is somewhat amusing. Anyways, I just wanted to say thanks for an informative read.
Happy New Year!
I didn't know Digg makes money. How do they make money? Surely not with Adsense. They can only make money from their potential to sell. Right?
Now, a quick question about this, why not redirect non-www to www?
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^digg.com [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) https://www.digg.com/$1 [R=301,L]
This is a brewin over at WMW.
anyways, yup. pick one or the other..
I personally favour www to non-www.
This is for three reasons:
It's not as pretty, but just for the WYSIWYG links alone it is worth it.
I would add an important case where non-www is better.
There are still many countries around the world where access to websites is censured. This could be for moral, religious or political reasons.
In those places (e.g. most countries in South-east Asia), a government agency is in charge of banning sites that shouldn't be accessed.
Well, you would be surprised that in many cases, a user cannot open www.verybadsite.com but can open verybadsite.com because they only blocked the www version of the domain :D
Not something which has ever really effected me.
Regarding domains with www versus without, it can also be worthwhile to chop down the size of the URLs by dropping www in order to reduce code bloat across one's site. Also, for a link-sharing type of service like Digg, shorting the links and code can also reduce likelihood of individuals accidentally malforming the links when they're taking them and using them.
I find it dumbfounding that some sites don't do this....
On another note. When I first looked into this issue years ago to fix it on my dad's site I started my foray into SEO
301 redirects are generally ignored by the larger sites I've worked on. Then when you mention it to people you just get blank stares and the programmers freak out.
Hmm I agree with you, but how is it going to save them $1m? Get better rankings, potentially more visitors and in turn, maybe more advertising dollars, but save money? If anything more bandwidth would cost them more money!
Yeah - it would probably be more accurate to say "make you money."
Yeah, I just figured it'd sound more sensationalist if I said "save you $1m"
I hate the stupid canonicalization problem. I don't see why the SEs choke on it so much. But since it is out there I created a little shortcut tool to generate the code for me and decided to share it.
Just out of curiosity, on the code on that page why do you have: Options +FollowSymlinks ?
Because it doesn't hurt and often .htaccess gets modified beyond the canonical fix. This way people that don't need it aren't affected but people that do can either see where the code goes or are set up for other changes.
What about adding QSA to the rewrite?I think Query strings are important (maybe not to digg?)
i understand why you need to redirect to one or the other, but...
is there a reason to redirect to the non www version instead of the www version? we've always done it the other way around and am wondering if there's something i don't know here.
No, it's just personal preference.
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Why should Digg do this? Way to often Digg posts come up for searches, with little to no actually information in the post. I think the search engines should actually start to remove Digg from search results. The stories they point to have the real information not the tiny little summaries at Digg and the comments have very little, if anything, to contribute.