Betaworks Flushes Seven Years of Internet History Down the Toilet ⇥ blogs.sfweekly.com

Keith Plocek really doesn’t like the new Digg:

[I]t only takes a couple clicks to realize all of the archives are gone. All of them. All of the Ron Paul idolatry. All of the ASCII facepalms. All of the linkbait. Gone.

This is the worst part of the reboot. Plocek thinks so, too, but not for the same reason you or I do:

[B]y removing all of Digg’s archives and creating dead links, the company removed seven years of content. We’re talking millions and millions of words, all of which were coming up in Google searches and driving traffic to Digg.com. Without all those words and working links, Digg.com can kiss its page rank [sic] goodbye.

Yeah, Plocek is worried not about the content, but the SEO implications. That seems like the least of their concerns right now, and it’s probably for the best. I’d be willing to bet that their PageRank won’t take much of a hit, since a bunch of other high PageRank sites are linking to it, and it will rebound shortly.

The lack of an archive is really disappointing, though.