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Search Engine Journal recently wrote an article quoting pieces of a debate that's sprung up about digg (and
more generically, the social bookmarking sites) being included in google's index.
Here are the arguments:
Allen Stern:
Quote:
My belief is that this is not enough to warrant a listing in Google. Since at its most basic sense Digg only
offers a link to the actual story, then that story should occupy that position within Google, not the Digg
link. I believe content publishers actually lose the chance to see that visitor because the person has to
click twice and even understand that they must do that. And I am talking about mainstream non-diggers now, not
the group who already understands what Digg is for.
William Burn:
Quote:
Digg.com is acting as a gateway to the great content which would (usually) have been lost in Google’s
monolithic index, never to be found or stumbled upon by searchers. Additionally, as a counter to his “the
person has to click twice and even understand that they must do that” statement, the Digg.com interface is
very easy to use, it’s almost an exact clone of a Google result (a big blue link/title with description
underneath) so the user will already be familiar with it, as a result the user would not be confused by it and
will find their way to the content they were looking for; that’s if the content still appeals to them after
reading the accompanying description.
Personally, I am a bit conflicted on this issue. Digg obviously has the ability to provide extra search engine
exposure for content. If said content is on a site that doesn't rank well in the SE's then the Digg listing
can help guide traffic to the content.
However, as Allen said, Digg is just listing a sentence or two of the content. That's not nearly enough and
really that listing shouldn't come before the actual content that Digg is pointing to. So, IMO google and the
other SE's should figure out a way to rank the original content before Digg's listing, perhaps with the Digg
listing (and the subsequent discussion on the topic) as a sub-listing. This could be done for any and all of
the major social bookmarking sites that link to that specific story.
What do you think?
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