Last week Digg released the DiggBar which resulted in plenty of criticism. The most widespread complaints seem to be that there is a loss of SEO benefits for content providers, and also the DiggBar url is what will be bookmarked by the user, as opposed to that of the content provider.

I’ll tell you straight out, right now I love the DiggBar and here’s why…

Less blind Digging (I hope)

People are lazy and have no problem blind Digging a story based on a title and the description of an article. As the content provider, this has absolutely no benefit to you unless you hit the front page of Digg. Now with the DiggBar, there’s really no excuse not to click through for content that you’re interested in, because the DiggBar gives you everything you need (Digg button, link back to Digg, link to the post, the ability to share the link, and the ability to kill the DiggBar.

Your CPM’s won’t suffer

Even with the DiggBar, your site will still serve up ad impressions to the reader. I don’t know about you, but most of my sites have over 60% of their traffic coming from referring sites, and the revenue they generate is through the CPM advertising model. Essentially, I don’t care how people get there. I’m going to get paid regardless of whether or not the reader viewed my content in the DiggBar iframe.

You can ditch the Digg toolbar

I hate toolbars because they just make for a painful web browsing experience. I avoid them at all costs, unless of course it’s a toolbar that will increase my productivity. With the DiggBar, you’re essentially getting the Digg toolbar, but only when you need it.

It’s a URL shortener

By simply adding “http://digg.com/” before any URL, you automatically get a shortened Digg URL. If you are really lazy, you can even add the DiggBar button to your bookmark toolbar, and it will shorten the URL with the click of a button.

Take that tinyurl.com!