Greedy BBC Blocks External Links

Yeh thats a shame
Some of the football bloggers on the beeb are very good at linking out so hopefully this will remain as one of my football blogs has some nice links from BBC.

You’ve got to wonder why they’re doing this, surely they aren’t leaking that much linkjuice? ;)

I wonder if the other top sites on the Internet will start limiting links to other sites, like you say, it’s not gonna do Google’s ranking much good.

Nice spot

bbc sucks, always has done always will. Jonathan ross is on an £18 million deal over 3 years, tax payers money, hes overpaid ! more than footballers

its sick hes earning more than an average family would earn within several generations

I remember when the beeb was forced to add those links in the first place, as people were (rightly) complaining that their position as a state funded body meant they didn’t have the same budget constraints as commercial organisations online and they were crushing the viability out of certain online segments (such as local news).

Frankly, it’s very poor that they’ve now changed the links to not pass juice. We haven’t had a link of the beeb, so I’ve no vested interest here. I just think it’s really poor and another example of nofollow and nojuice on links making the world of seo harder and harder. For commercial organisations, you can understand it. From the bbc, there’s no real excuse..

This is just crazy. You should try and get hold of someone at the BBC and ask them to justify it. We pay their wages, afterall.

Hi, i’m the tech editor at BBC News website. I’ll pass this on…

Hi Darren, appreciate the comment.

In my experience the main reason other mainstream media websites have stopped linking is they don’t want to pass link weight to other sites. They expect to get links but are not prepared to give links in return.

In fact the more links you give the more you get.

My comment about the BBC being greedy is obviously over the top, I was being sensationalist to attract attention to the issue in the hope it might be fixed. :-)

Having worked at BBC online for many years, it’s fair to say the when it comes to these sort of concerns, their actions aren’t purposeful, the people in charge just don’t have a clue about the importance of linking out properly. Yes they were told to link out more, and to prove they’re doing this is why they have these redirect scripts to log how many clicks they’re sending to external links. It’s been the same on the content side of the BBC for years.

There are so many fingers in the pie when it comes to the organisation of the online BBC, the mistake you’re making is thinking that they think and act like a single SEO working on a massive site. It’s not the case, things like link juice, ranking, page rank sculpting or any of the stuff someone like Patrick would concern himself with is not on the agenda at BBCi. You just have to look at the way the whole of the millions of pages of great content in the various forums are kept out of the search engines with an ill conceived meta no-follow to see that they really don’t have a clue.

In the five years I worked in online, the only SEO advice given was to use a good meta title and keywords. I say told, it was more of a suggestion than anything. We didn’t even use H tags until someone decided the sites needed to be more xhtml compliant. Up until then we were told to do headlines with bold tags. I didn’t work in news, this was the proper content sections, and if we didn’t have a clue, I can guarantee you the under pressure news people had even less of one.

They will know the traffic is coming from the BBC, it shouldn’t block the referer details at all.

Martin surely if they can build something as good as iPlayer they can build a system of tracking clicks on links using AJAX, JavaScript and the onclick command? That way they pass PageRank and track clicks at the same time.

Well, it’s an improvement on the previous, dire, method, much derided on their blog, but I am still concerned about the accessibility implications, so have raised a thread in the issue on Accessify Forums.

*cough* hypocrite *cough*

Can anyone remind me why the BBC website contains anything other than news and programme/station info? Most of the rest looks like duplicating other broadcasters but funded by obligatory payments collected by TV Licensing non-halloween ghouls.

Time for a “We paid the BBC £110 million for this website last year and all we got was this lousy interstitial link page” t-shirt at their next web event?

Swags, you’re reading a little too much into that comment me thinks. At least Darren’s a man of his word.

They aren’t the only ones. Earlier this year I started a list of sites with annoying external link policies. But as it ended up being all mainstream UK news sites, I gave up on it fairly quickly!

I wonder how this will affect current ranking algorithms. Personally when explaining Trust Rank etc. I always discuss potential seeds and why the BBC would be a good choice. I guess it’s time to update those slides.

I think it’s terrible that the BBC won’t use licence payers’ money to enhance your business. String ‘em up, it’s the only language they understand.

So it’s a mixture of history and stupidity that produces the BBC-hoards-all-the-SEO-points-it-can effect? But who cares? Why not fix it instead of excusing it?

Heck, the BBC can’t even run blog comments any more, requiring licence fee payers to register their email address, date of birth, first school, before telling them “Unfortunately, we have a technical problem Please come back later. We are sorry for the inconvenience.”

Maybe I missed it, but John’s post doesn’t seem to describe a working accessible fix, with comments about Javascript and so on. The obvious way of using it would seem to defeat the original aim of click-tracking, so I thought I misunderstood what’s going to happen.

The blog upgrade post was dated in April. I saw that obnoxious email, date, first school and oops “technical problem” problem yesterday (I tried registering yesterday, to make sure the problem hadn’t been fixed yet). I’m guessing that the BBC site expects Internet Explorer with very low security and privacy settings, but doesn’t document its requirements.

Martin Belam – that BBC’s browser support standards link says “This site is no longer being updated” so I’m not sure if that’s current. The Future Media Standards link very slowly served me a page that looked like a bit of a mess, with lines crashing into each other and so on, so maybe they’re not ready yet. I finished writing this comment while waiting for the next FMS page to load.

The link given is depressingly browser-centric instead of based on vendor-independent standards. It’s the equivalent of saying “you will buy a TV receiver from X, Y or Z” instead of “we’re broadcasting 625-line PAL … ” and so on. But then, the BBC has been telling iPlayer viewers to use Adobe, Apple, … products and even “ordinary” TV is no longer safe: as part of freeview and freesat, the BBC have been getting very near doing that (instead of saying they broadcast in DVB-S with MHEG and so on…) so maybe this is all part of a wider capture of the BBC by vendors.

Rendering fine now on FF3(equiv) on Linux. Might have been related to the BBC site going slow then timing out when I last looked.

I suppose the BBC could say we produce exactly standards complaint code, and if it doesn’t work for the majority of our audience who use ‘vendor’ supplied browsers, then tough cookies, but that doesn’t really support universal access, does it?

Yes, it would! (ITYM compliant) Would anyone argue against the BBC saying we produce standards compliant broadcasts and if that doesn’t work for a minority of our audience, then you need to get your TV fixed?

I wrote that the BBC may be being captured, in a wider way than just browsers. Feel free to argue either way – at this point, I don’t understand which takes precedence: their XHTML and CSS standards, or their browser support standard.

“You are – and will remain so long as there is a license fee – answerable to the public.”

Being answerable doesn’t give the public a right to abuse you and accuse you of anything you like.

Try and remember that people who work for the BBC are people like everyone else. What’s more, the kind of people who will respond to you are trying to engage with you on a human level. Coming across like you’re accusing them of something isn’t like to encourage engagement.

Patrick,

”

Teddy what is hypocritical about this? I use nofollow because the urls added in the comments are not editorially granted by me – most of them I’ve never even visited so why would I give a real link to them?

The BBC links are useful links given by editors who think that readers might link them. This layer of editorial choice means nofollow isn’t required.”

In what way is this different to the nofollow on your Gravatar link? It looks like the same principals, only on a different scale.