Tweet For Bucks

Fly out of the Diggbar and other frames with Sir Tweet O' Lot.

Recently Digg introduced the DiggBar to it’s website  (The DiggBar is not the Digg Toolbar). Some people are liking the DiggBar and others are hating it.

Here’s how the DiggBar works, when someone checks out a link that is posted they are taken to a page on Digg’s website where the web site is in an iFrame below the DiggBar. Sounds OK on the surface, but there’s plenty of SEO fanatics are worried this may cause cause damage to a website search ranking. There is no way of knowing for certain until the summer Google Dance, by the way rumor has it that the April 9th will be the latest page rank update.

Back in the 90’s I was working for a newspaper group and the owners wanted us to create a similar contraption as the DiggBar to keep visitors on our websites as much a possible. The company charged per advertisement impressions and they were going to do everything they could to milk every impression possible. I created script in Pearl for the outlink bar to please my bosses, but we found that our readers and the sites we linked to hated the outlink bar. What we noticed was that we started to lose readers over the run of a year. Finally the decision was made to drop the bar and the readers slowly returned.

At the time of the outlink bar I owned website that I that was linked to from a few of the newspapers and I hated the bar because it was a distraction that would prevent first time viewers from bookmarking my site. I decided there was something I could do about the problem and came up with a short script to breakout of the framed page. It was nothing fancy, just functional and there are a thousand variations that can do the same thing. After reading and hearing people cry foul about the DiggBigg I thought I would share the script.

The script in the area below is simple to install and incorporate into your website or blog. Simply highlight and copy the text between the “—Copy Below—” and “—Copy Above—”, paste it into the head of area of your webpage and save the page to your web server. It shouldn’t take more than a couple minutes to do and you can go find the next issue help with your search engine optimization strategy.

—Copy Below—

<script language=”Javascript”>
<!–
if (top.location != self.location) {
top.location = self.location.href
}
//–>
</script>

—Copy Above—

UPDATE: You can download the script here in a text file. Simply open it up in a text editor, then copy and paste into your the head of you webpage anywhere before the  closing tag </head>. Thanks to Mantis108 for pointing out this out. I’ll double check things on the final post in the future.