Does Digg links pass link juice ? May be not.

Digg,in its efforts to curb spam and increase quality in its content has gone ahead and nofllowed as many “spammish” looking/behaving links form the site. And it will continue to do so, says the official digg blog.

We’ve added rel=”nofollow” to any external link that we’re not sure we can vouch for. This includes all external links from comments, user profiles and story pages below a certain threshold of popularity.

So basically, it means that Digg will have an “algorithm” which will help it decide what stories submitted / what user profiles are spam or aren’t trustworthy. And the nofollow tag goes to all of them.

Matt Cutts thinks that this is a smart move, and admitted that Google Knol has also been doing something similar with their stories.

I think this is smart but not just the right way to do it. Or may be, its too immature to jump into conclusions now.

To judge this is a smart move, just because they (digg) applied a formula that they think might work well, is confusing. Because, we got to watch out and see how the “algorithm” works. How do they decide what’s trustable and what’s not is really important.

If the algorithm is based on popularity, then I think this will be a big mistake. Because, if I could hire diggers to make my site popular (which I don’t think Matt knows, but I could be wrong), then that gives me traffic as well as a super cool dofollow link. Two birds for one shot.

But if the algorithm takes into consideration other factors too along with popularity, then this is something to watch out for.

The best method would be do it manually or semi-automatically but in my opinion any kind of automation will only do bad than good. So may be Digg should employ a new team to do this manually, or they should create an algorithm that is as good as doing it manually.

Anyhow, I’m sure the entire SEO community will be watching this closely.

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