Today my good buddy Brent Csutoras put up a post about digg selling text links on the site. Basically digg now has someone sponsoring the “digg dialogg” (yeah – the 2.0 spelling annoys me too). In the screenshot on Brent’s site you can clearly see that it says “Presented by Freecreditreport.com”. 

Big Hairy Frakkin Deal! (I’m on season 3 of BSG – it’s killer)

What’s that you say? Digg is selling text links? Maybe. MAYBE they are just selling perfectly legit sponsorships and the first customer just happened to have a great keyword rich domain and digg didn’t bother to kiss Google’s ass and nofollow the link or put it behind a redirect. I don’t think we need to bust out the pitchforks and torches and swarm the fortress just yet. I’d like to see a second sponsor and what that link looks like. If they sell a sponsorship to an airline and the link says “cheap airfare” I’ll lead the charge. 

Initially the link was followed and since the news broke digg decided to avoid a public beating for a second time in a few weeks and now they’ve nofollowed the sponsored links. 

Google has us running so scared that we’re once again doing their jobs for them. The link clearly disclosed that it was sponsored. In my book that should be enough. Sure Google would like us to put that crap in javascript, use a nofollow blah blah blah. Google has a ton of pretty clever people over there. How about we make them earn their paychecks and sort out the linking issues on their own. 

Google has billions of our ad dollars in the bank. Let’s make them spend some of that fixing their own problems. Can ya digg it?