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BBC Responds About External Links

Just to clear something up, I don’t really think the BBC is greedy or selfish, that was just my way of drawing attention to what is quite an important issue.

Clearly it worked because a number of people from the BBC have been looking into the issue and are going to be releasing some improvements in the future.

Quite often organisations do things with the best of intentions that don’t play nicely with the way search engines work. In this case the BBC wanted to measure how much traffic they were sending to other sites so that they could figure out how to send more.

It’s nice to see the BBC responding to feedback in this way and large companies should take note on the way they have handled the issue.

BY Patrick Altoft AT 7:20pm ON Wednesday, 5 November 2008

Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3 and has worked in the SEO industry for over 10 years. With experience across some of the worlds largest brands as well as startup businesses Patrick is well known in the industry and speaks regularly at the major SEO conferences and events. Follow Patrick on Twitter or Google+

Comments

  • http://www.manifest-passive-income.com Kim McGinnis

    Patrick,
    That is refreshing indeed. It is easy to make the big companies into the devil in disguise – I used to think this way about Google. But, know I just give Google and the SEs what they want-great content, and what do you know…my new six-week old website’s Alexa has plummeted.

    Playing nice can work.

  • http://adrianmonck.com/ Adrian Monck

    “Just to clear something up, I don’t really think the BBC is greedy or selfish, that was just my way of drawing attention to what is quite an important issue.”

    Then I guess you own them an apology. Which is a way of drawing attention to the fact that you didn’t really mean what you said.

  • http://www.jamespoole.org.uk James Poole

    Good to see the BBC using some sense for a change

    You got a nice link in there aswell Patrick :)

  • http://crisiscartoon.blogspot.com/ Crisis Cartoon

    Everyone is trying to make a living and so does BBC.
    They are trying to monetize their online presence … I guess some SEO gurus that they hired must have given the bad advice.

  • http://www.thefloatingfrog.co.uk/ The Floating Frog

    Beautifully wording Patrick, I do hope this issue sorts itself out for all who rely on it.

    Good Luck!

  • http:www.seo.co.nz jaybong

    You clearly cooked up this entire plot to rank for “sinister”, thus exponentially cumulatively aggregating your keyword density and KEI.

    Seriously though, it’s disappointing to see you implicitly criticised for hording page rank by having nofollow for comments on this blog ,which of course is for legitimate reasons and standard practice.

  • http://www.michaelthorn.co.uk Mike

    Quality way to get another BBC backlink though Patrick lol maybe if we all complain we’ll all get a BBC backlink ;)

  • http://www.gospelrhys.co.uk Rhys

    Mentioned this on the BBC website. Will break it down into 3 points:-

    1. How has your traffic increased from a “hidden” link?
    2. How has your RSS/other metrics increased from a “hidden” link?
    3. Where are you now ranking (or will be ranking) for the keyword “sinister”?

  • http://www.blogstorm.co.uk Patrick Altoft

    Rhys you can see the ranking for the word “sinister”, its on page 2 at the moment and is unlikely to ever get to page 1.

    The BBC sent 46 visitors since the article was published. Not a lot but we value new readers very highly here so I’m pleased.

  • http://www.arenaflowers.com/blog Will – ArenaFlowers.com

    Hotlinked for sinister or not, still got to help your site’s domain pr..
    Have enjoyed watching the hullabaloo following your post.

  • Pingback: Manchester web design | web designers | seo | Altrincham | Cheshire | creativesuit

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