In a major cost cutting exercise the government is to close up to 600 websites in a bid to save over £100m per year in running costs. Some of the numbers being quoted are quite amazing, the Business Link apparently cost £35m last year.
A report from the Central Office for Information, published today, found that £94 million was spent on the construction and set up and running costs of just 46 sites. The Government also spent £32 million on staff costs for those sites in 2009-10.
The most expensive websites were uktradeinvest.gov.uk which costs £11.78 per visit and businesslink.gov.uk which costs £2.15 per visit, according to the COI.
Clearly this is going to cause a huge shakeup in the UK search results, firstly due to the fact that 600 sites with a lot of traffic will disappear (we can be quite sure that 301 redirects won’t be applied) but secondly due to the sudden loss of the most trusted links available.
Sites that rely on lots of .gov.uk links could suddenly face large drops in rankings once these sites stop working.
What will be interesting is to see how many SEO companies start replicating the content of these doomed websites for clients and then contacting everybody who has linked to a particular .gov.uk site suggesting they link to their sites instead. it could be a very big opportunity to get links.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
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{ 15 comments… read them below or add one }
Another opportunity for SEO companies again. I agree when you said that they can acquire those .gov.uk and get the users link to them.
£11.78 per visit! And without buying traffic. A lot of SEOs would have to try pretty hard to make a site cost that much.
It's a good day for all those UK webmasters that were in the number 2 spot for related terms though.
Looking at this I'm surprised it's only 11.78!
http://www.yorkshire-forward.com/about/vacancies/...
And I've hread from a very good source that all planned government IT projects over 100k have been scrapped. Interesting times indeed.
This will undoubtedly have a large impact on SEO and I too, wouldn't be surprised if many SEO companies attempted to replicate the content and point the backlinks to their content.
Do you know of any published list of these government run websites they intend to shut down Patrick? I really can't see Business Link being one of them but at a running cost of £35M last year… Who knows.
That's a major decision. They should have discussed some alternatives rather than closing them down.
Wow, great opportunity here if done correctly.
Yeah, totally agree with Chris Smith here, If it's done properly, this can actually work to our advantages!
Business Link works no and uktradeinvest.gov.uk doesn't
anyway you can see it in the archive http://web.archive.org/web/20040926030745/http://...
This is finally sad news for UK readers, They should be use a 301 redirection to these domains for better reputation, this is my suggestion is for UK government.
Great article. I cannot believe the amount of money wasted on Governement sites. In our area we have just has our local police force pay £250,000 for a new site, and their justification was that they had not spent any money for 8 years!
Ironically, although local government talks about promoting local businesses, not one company in our region got a sniff of any of the work. Even though many of us agencies are supposedly governement approved.
Sounds good to me, as now i can capitalise on the weakened positioning of my rivals. First page here we come. We've already gone up 4 pages in 4 weeks.
Why don't they open up running the sites to private industry who might be able to maintain a site for less than £35 million/year. Seriously that's insane prices for a website, but I guess a lot of web development agencies might be out of pocket now they lost that cashcow….
I see the old Business Link West Yorkshire domain (blwy dot co dot uk) has already fallen into private hands and has been re-branded as Business News.
This will have a huge impact and i'm sure was not a decision that was rushed. Closing this many websites will have a ripple effect, a result of which will be the void in search results as mentioned. I'm sure there will be a fair few companies who will try and take advantage of this opportunity and offer their SEO services.
It will be interesting to see how Google will handle this many sites and links disappearing, as certain search results will be completely shaken up once the sites are offline. The discontinued sites will no doubt have had a good search ranking, and therefore the impact of them disappearing will be widespread.
Now that is an expensive website!!! lol The cost of the websites stipulated above are a budget cutting effort that many individals would never had thought of. The monetary figures for the site seems astranomical. Very interesting read thanks for sharing – p.s. most expensive site i've read about!
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