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UPDATE: For the latest on this story, see Confirmed: Digg Just Hijacked Your Twitter Links

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The social news site Digg found itself criticized earlier this year after the release of the DiggBar and Digg short URLs, which some said “stole” traffic and pagerank from publisher sites to increase Digg’s pageviews.

Now Digg faces a new accusation: that it has, either accidentally or on purpose, changed the behavior of these URLs to send logged-out users to Digg.com in preference to the publisher sites. We were able to verify that Digg is indeed redirecting Digg URLs to its own site.

DiggBar Controversy

First, a little background. At launch, Digg URLs provided an alternative to popular URL shorteners like bit.ly and TinyURL (commonly used to save characters on Twitter), except that the links loaded publisher sites in framed pages on Digg.com. Some claimed that this was a way to build traffic to Digg while hurting the search engine traffic provided to publishers.

After a firestorm in the SEO community that lead to some sites adding “framebreakers” to prevent Digg framing their sites, Digg relented and decided to only frame pages if the user was logged in to Digg at the time.

New Digg URL Behavior: Redirects Traffic to Digg.com

This week Digg users have noticed an odd change in the way Digg URLs work: for logged out users, they no longer go to the site they link to. Instead, the links go to the Digg.com page for that story, provided it has already been submitted to Digg. The result? The thousands of short links that people are trying to create to their favorite websites are instead redirecting their followers to a Digg landing page.

The blog EndofWeb, which appears to have spotted the issue first, calls this a “bait and switch” operation.

You can try it out for yourself: choose any webpage URL and place Digg.com/ at the front of it to create a Digg URL. While this used to create a link that redirects to the original story, it now simply directs visitors to the Digg.com landing page for that story.

Intentional Change or Mistake?

If intentional, the move is likely to sour Digg’s relationships with publishers: Digg became popular based on its ability to drive traffic to publisher sites, but the DiggBar showed Digg’s intent to retain more of that traffic on its own site.

If a mistake, it’s likely to damage trust in URL shorteners: users want to be sure that when they create a link, it’ll send visitors to the intended destination. When that process fails, it hurts confidence.

We’ve reached out to Digg via email for more information.

What do you think? Are your Digg URLs directing to Digg.com?