Digg’s Short URLs Hack
There are indeed Digg short URLs that will not redirect traffic to Digg. Several news websites have reported a change in the mechanism of working of Digg’s URL shortening service. The new short URLs, as well as the ones made before Digg’s URL shortening service update, will redirect users who are not logged in to Digg and click on them, to the corresponding Digg page of the story, instead of the original article web page. It is obvious the fact that Digg wants to have more traffic and users, while the other publishers will have less readers, because they will be redirected to Digg.
Digg’s URL shortening service works in conjunction with the DiggBar: “DiggBar enables you to Digg, read comments, find related content, and share stuff from any page on the Web. And it’s presented in a short URL format, making it easy to share in emails, on Twitter, and via other services. In addition to finding it on all outbound links from Digg, you can generate the DiggBar using any of the following solutions.”
Therefore, if you submit a story on Digg (while you are logged in to Digg of course), based on its Digg short URL, you will see the original article page framed by the DiggBar. But the Internet users not logged in to Digg, that will click the short URL link pointing to your article, will be redirected to the Digg page where you have submitted the article.
If a certain article is not yet submitted to Digg social networking service, you can safely create a Digg short URL by adding http://digg.com/ in the front of the link or with the help of the DiggBar bookmarlet, such that the traffic generated by this short URL to be redirected only to your website (the Digg website will be bypassed, even the users are not logged into Digg).
In conclusion, if you are using short URLs for your web pages in order to promote them via email or social networking services, due to the possible visitors redirection to Digg website, Digg’s URL shortening service is not a suitable choice to gain the desired traffic level, unless your article become popular on Digg.
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