Is Your URL Digg Compatible?

Wouldn't it be a shame? You wrote a great piece, it was relevant not only for your general readership, but also for the social media audience. Not only that, but a user with a large audience wanted to submit your piece, but couldn't because of your URL structure.

That's what happened to yesterday when I tried to submit a story from MSN Money to Digg:

I tried submitting the story using a bookmarklet, a contextual menu plugin, and by directly using the submission form but each time the submission gave an error because the URL is not compatible with Digg. The story has everything going for it, including that it is a more personal spin on one a popular meme on Digg from the past week.

In fact, some of the most popular stories on Digg have been about the current downward trend in the dollar and MSN Money's story could've been up there with the rest. So before you start writing for the social media audience, make sure that you can actually get your content onto the social media sites.

Enjoy the post? Here are some more that may interest you.

There are no trackbacks for this post yet.

Dharmesh Shah, November 9, 2007

Interesting.

Any tips on what rules digg uses in terms of determining URLs that are compatible?

Spinchange, November 9, 2007

@ Dharmesh

In my experience, this problem is specific to Microsoft's proprietary active server extended pages (URLs ending in ".aspx") MSN is the only large news/content provider that I've seen using that file type. The majority of outside sites running on Microsoft's .NET platform are generating the regular '.asp' pages (with no Active X scripting), and those submit fine to Digg.

Jeremy Luebke, November 10, 2007

I'm sorry but if they are running .NET that are probably not running .asp. Those are old school asp pages. And digg has zero problem with the aspx extension.

More than likely there is an issue in the headers being returned by that page cause there is nothing wrong with that URL.

tummblr, November 11, 2007

I couldn't find much information on Google explaining why Digg might say that the URL is invalid, though there are lots of reports of people having this problem using all kinds of different web apps, including WordPress. Oftentimes people report that the problem goes away. Is it possible Digg just couldn't verify that your webpage exists by following the URL due to some temporary routing or DNS issue?

diegomoney, November 11, 2007

you have a great website, i found you tiping john chow on my google search. you should make a category on your sidebar or in a post about "your best posts" or best guides, cause you have about 1100 indexed pages, and maybe you have some very usefull.

Business Marketing, November 11, 2007

Wow, that went way over my head. Why exactly didn't it submit correctly?

Aurleius Tjin, November 11, 2007

Good point! Thanks for sharing this post. It pays to take note of little stuff like this.

Spinchange, November 12, 2007

@ Jeremy Lubke. I'm no MS Expert, but .asp pages are part of the .NET stack too. As unlikely as it seemed, that was the only thing I could think of, because MSN is the only site I've ever seen this problem from (when it wasn't a banned domain) AND its the only site I've noticed using the newer .aspx filetype. What you're saying does make more sense though.

susan, November 12, 2007