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Earlier today we mentioned that Digg.com appears to have changed the behavior of its short URLs so they no longer go to the source of the story for logged-out users: instead they direct visitors to a landing page on Digg.com.

The change has many negative implications for publishers, including the fact that readers who think they are creating a link to your content are actually just pushing traffic to Digg.

Digg support: “This is working as intended”

Now Digg appears to have confirmed this questionable move was intentional. While we’ve yet to receive a response to our email, reader JD Rucker (who was one of the first to blog about the change) complained about the issue to Digg support and received a reply confirming the switch has been made deliberately:

JD: Not sure if this is a mistake or something that was planned, but it appears that when people who aren’t logged into Digg click on Diggbar links, they are now taken to the Digg page and not the source. Are you aware of this? Is it going to be fixed? Thanks!

Digg: Hi from Digg,

Thank you for writing us about this matter. This is working as intended. Please let us know if you have any feedback or have additional questions we can assist you with.

Digg Support

The move has many implications which are sure to irk Digg’s most valuable source of traffic and content: the publishers. Not only is Digg diverting traffic away from publisher sites, but many Twitter applications added Digg URL support on the assumption that Digg URLs would always work the same way as Bit.ly, TinyURL and the rest.

For instance, Tweetmeme, the service we use at Mashable to allow people to retweet posts, rotates through multiple URL shorteners including Digg. In some cases, people trying to share our stories will unknowingly be directing their followers to Digg instead of this site.

Old Links Redirect, Too

There are two further problems. First, Digg has failed to inform the community of the change – users are still using the shortener to create links to their favorite sites with no idea that they’re actually diverting their Twitter followers to Digg.

Worse: all previously created Digg URLs now appear to redirect to Digg.com. When I created this Tweet in April and included a Digg URL, I meant to link to a story here on Mashable. Now Digg has decided it would be better for my followers to visit their site, even though that wasn’t my intent when creating the link.

It’s the equivalent of opening a highway to Chicago, then diverting it to St. Louis without telling any of the drivers.

In short, Digg has broken the trust relationship with its publishers and users. They might not be hurting, however, since the use of Diggbar links significantly increased the amount of traffic to their site. Now that they’re driving a bunch more traffic from thousands of hijacked URLs, they’ll experience a veritable traffic bonanza at the expense of users and publishers.