BBC buying and definately not selling links

by Patrick Altoft on May 20, 2008

After Dave outed the Economist for selling links they were quick to apply the nofollow tag to prevent Google getting too upset.

Today it seems like the BBC want to waste more of our license fees by buying up some of the tiny footer links for themselves. How many clicks do you think this advert gets compared to the price the BBC pay? If they are using nofollow then why bother with keyword rich links?

They already rank number 1 for “mortgage calculator” so I can’t understand why they are bothering with this unless it’s part of some grand link exchange scheme.

I also wonder how an affiliate site gets a lucrative spot on the right hand side of the BBC’s mortgage calculator page. Since the BBC isn’t allowed to host any advertising on their site that must be one of the most lucrative free links in the world. I realise they are not spiderable links but they surely send targeted traffic.

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Published in: Link Building

{ 13 comments… read them below or add one }

1 John 20/05/2008 at 8:23 pm: I know someone who is lucky enough to have a free link from the BBC and it’s simply because his was the only other site on the topic when the BBC create the page (i.e. back in 199x) and no one seems to have updated the links since.
2 Lee 20/05/2008 at 8:59 pm: Maybe The BBC didn’t buy the links, but the Economist chose to link to them to make sure nobody got penalized? I often link out to other 100% trustworthy sites if I’m doing something I shouldn’t be.
3 Nate Nead 20/05/2008 at 10:22 pm: This is a little bit of an issue of what your personal agenda is. I think the best way to do it is free through dofollow links. However, the nofollow seems more attractive, but the problem is that I don’t see any decrease in the spam anyway….what can you do?
4 BlogTalks 21/05/2008 at 7:38 am: Maybe they just asked nicely to get their links on the BBC site:)
5 gabs 21/05/2008 at 7:40 am: The link on the beeb are added via connections with web manager in the beeb.. simple as that.

I had a great link 2 clicks off the home page for 4 yrs.. Sadly gone now as has the beeb web manager who I used work with..

BUT the sites that the beeb do link are good but not necessarily the “best”
6 Christoph 21/05/2008 at 1:28 pm: Let’s jump to assumptions straight away and assume that they pay for that ad without finding out..! After all, you were completely wrong last time about BBC spending license fee money on the social media spam links - topgear.com isn’t anything to do with your money, it’s BBC Worldwide which generates profits for the BBC, hence the advertising on the Top Gear website

I agree that I’d like one of those free links, it’s just down to luck really that you get chosen as related content..! I don’t suppose those pages get updated with better related links, as it’s probably better of them spending our licence fee on doing something better with their development time.
7 Patrick Altoft 21/05/2008 at 4:14 pm: Just because BBC Worldwide and the actual BBC are technically separate entities it doesn’t mean their spamming wasn’t wasting license fee payers money.

If BBC Worldwide spends money doing inefficient and useless marketing then that makes their profits lower and means we need to pay more license fees to support the BBC.

I’m not saying these links are paid, just that they are good links. We know from the comments above the BBC is somewhat nepotistic in handing out links.
8 clive 21/05/2008 at 4:35 pm: I spotted this a few days ago, also the fact that moneyexpert.com have bought a link on there now as well.

My opionion at the time was that the bbc link, and the oxfam link, are there for appearance, they’re not bought.

Flightfind and moneyexpert, they’re bought, and they’re wasting their money because those links are nofollowed.
9 sean 22/05/2008 at 12:50 pm: I think that Moneyexpert.com and Moneynet.co.uk are owned by the same company. So the answer might be that they decided to buy the link which links to the BBC becuase the BBC page links to Moneynet. Therefore, moneynet would get more link juice without directly pointing a paid link at it’s own site.

There is no way that the BBC would paid for a link which has the sole purpose of increasing pagerank.
10 Patrick Altoft 22/05/2008 at 1:10 pm: The BBC link to moneynet goes through a redirect so I don’t think it passes PageRank. It must send good traffic though.
11 clive 22/05/2008 at 1:19 pm: sean

no moneyexpert are separately owned.

one trend is that both moneyexpert and flightfind are heavy users of the DP co-op link network, so maybe use the same agency.
12 Dio 23/05/2008 at 8:51 am: Having worked for BBC Online, I can assure you that when it comes to SEO they are pretty clueless and lacking in a coherent practice policy across the service. Just look at their message boards for proof of this, millions of pages of great user generated content rendered invisible to the search engines due to its sitewide robots nofollow metatags.

As for the BBCs linking out policy, the corporation’s remit is to try make a point of linking out to respected sites. However, in practice I think that most external links are decided on by someone choosing the first couple of semi decent results they see in Goolge! Whilst the content sites at the BBC run through a redirect script (for tracking purposes - to check they’re hitting external referring targets), those added to the BBC news pages are clean links.

I got a nice one to one of my Bingo sites from News last year, which sort of proves that they just take what they see at the top of the SERPs rather than choosing the most relevant page. My site whilst good, isn’t the most relevant for the subject they linked it for, but it was better placed than the more relevant site at the time.
13 david 07/06/2008 at 6:27 am: “definately” = the most annoying misspelling in the history of the universe.