4) Upon clicking the link, viewer's friends are taken to Digg. The requested content is framed underneath the DiggBar, but the URL is based on an underlying Digg.com address.   The requested site gains traffic... Digg does too, and increases its metrics for how long users stay on the site.

5) Digg grows in power and popularity, VCs tremble and open pocketbooks. And don't forget the advertising--clicking on the DiggBar's "source" or "related" button pops up the content alongside a huge, square advertisement. Digg wins even more.

The DiggBar Dilemma

So why, then, are Webmasters upset? After all, point #4 spells it out pretty succinctly: The Dugg sites still gain the traffic from a normal Digg front-page hit. In fact, they gain double the traffic: one hit for the intial site loading up in the DiggBar frame, and another whenever a user clicks the big "X" in the corner of the DiggBar to remove it.

The difference now is that Digg homepage links now go to Digg-based pages. By pulling up the actual stories in a frame, and wrapping this entire package in a Digg-based URL, Web sites lose the ability to make dramatic leaps on the search engine ranking scale. The URL that's being passed around the Internet is Digg's, not the targeted site's. The URL that gets bookmarked in a user's browser? Digg's again. And the site in question doesn't even receive the benefits of the Digg for search optimization: That's because Digg is , not linking to it directly.