Is the BBC spamming social media?

by Patrick Altoft on April 17, 2008

Over the last few days I’ve noticed a couple of what I believe to be spam submissions to Sphinn with links to topgear.com, the official website of the BBC TV show fronted by Jeremy Clarkson.

The BBC really doesn’t need to be submitting spam to get better rankings so I decided to see what was going on, screenshots of my findings are below.

The screenshot below shows the submissions to Digg from topgear.com recently. Notice how a lot of them are from the same two users.

Check out the submissions below from Digg user vinomancat, he sure seems to like Digging the Top Gear website with 11 submissions in the last couple of months.

The screenshot below shows the topgear.com site being submitted to Sphinn in the Google category. Sphinn is a site about internet marketing and has nothing to do with cars whatsoever.

What do you think? Spam? A company making a mess of SEO? Is this intentional?

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{ 20 comments… read them below or add one }

Nick James 17 Apr 2008 at 2:00 pm: Perhaps it’s just James May trying to get to grips with this “new-fangled-social-blogging-media-gubbins”.
spostareduro 17 Apr 2008 at 2:02 pm: Oh my, it certainly looks that way doesn’t it?
Tad Chef 17 Apr 2008 at 2:29 pm: Probably “Social Media Optimization” outsourced to India.
Patrick Altoft 17 Apr 2008 at 2:40 pm
Find me on Twitter: Quite possibly.
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Glen Allsopp 17 Apr 2008 at 3:14 pm: It might be nothing to do with them, I wouldn’t be hugely surprised either way.

We have on client where someone submitted like 5 of their stories to Digg in one day just because they had done well in the past so its possible its just “normal people”
Gavin Mitchell 17 Apr 2008 at 4:35 pm: Although it looks like it at first, the language used doesn’t really have the feel of an Indian outsource.

The “online marketing consulting” company in the second Digg screenshot boasts of having the BBC, Channel 4 and Top Gear as clients and appear London based, so it’s possible that this is an actual campaign on the BBC’s behalf.

Whether or not the Top Gear spam that’s flying about is actually the company in question’s work or not I wouldn’t like to speculate. If it is, you would have to say it’s breath-takingly poor.
Maria Reyes-McDavis 17 Apr 2008 at 6:26 pm: This is either a case of SPAM or, unfortunately, someone who just doesn’t get it. Great example of what not to do.

Maria
you having a laff? 17 Apr 2008 at 10:20 pm: because this couldnbt at all be some sad loser with nothing better to do with his time than try asnd maske friends by reposting bbc articles.

This is rediculous, why does everyone look for some kind of cvonspiracy – these people are sad individuals, not the bbd.

Geeez Louise!
Luke 18 Apr 2008 at 9:45 am: Well I do think this is something of nothing.

I was once toying with a SEO tool and did a report on a sites linkbacks. I ran the tool to gather emails from the sites that linked to the “test” site and sent emails asking for linkbacks.

Now I understand that email farming is a spam process and before I sent any emails I checked to ensure that they where valid. Now my point here is that I only sent 50 emails using this tool and I havn;t touched it since, due to the fine line between emailing genuine link requests and spamming using these tools. I would just like to point out though that I got an extremely good response from the email with people wanting to work together to link to each others sites, so even though some of you might think that what I did that one time was spam I think the people who are doing it are really reaping the benefits.

Also before I end, the process that the tool went through is basically the process that I and i’m sure many other people do other automated.
Patrick Altoft 18 Apr 2008 at 9:55 am
Find me on Twitter: Luke to be honest I have nothing against link exchange emails, automated or otherwise. Some of them are well written and useful. As ever some are badly written and untargeted but the rest are not spam.

The act of submitting spam to a social network like sphinn is a task that forces moderators to remove it which they should be compensated for. If the BBC is doing this internally or via an external company then it’s my TV licence that’s paying for it and that upsets me.
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Luke 18 Apr 2008 at 9:55 am: Wow so many mistakes in my comment above, not good for a Friday morning, my apologies.
ScottB 18 Apr 2008 at 11:40 am: Could just be their SEO agency doing a poor job of keeping up the brand image. I had the same issue with Jobsite.co.uk spamming one of my forums (which was justified as being the work of “an employee who has now left the SEO agency”).

It’s the sad tendancy of SEO agencies to push the limits of what they can get away with until they are pulled up on it. The clients should be enforcing more control over the external activities of their agencies. IMO, SMO / link building for big brands should be controlled more carefully by marketing or PR departments – most don’t realise the negative impact a poor campaign can have.

Scott
Patrick Altoft 18 Apr 2008 at 11:45 am
Find me on Twitter: I wouldn’t say “mistakes”. All comments are good
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Matt Keegan 18 Apr 2008 at 2:30 pm: I have been having a difficult time getting some traction with my Autos sumbit to Digg and now I know why. By the looks of it, they aren’t getting quite the results either. I wonder why?
Sam B 18 Apr 2008 at 5:09 pm: My guess is an obsessive fan, having seen the way a lot of them use Wikipedia. There they create separate articles on every mindnumbingly insignificant aspect of the target of their obession – the individual articles on each of the hundreds of Pokémon are the most well-known example (I believe they may have since been merged). Going through every car review on a site and Digging each one seems to me to be very much on the same lines.
t3rr1f1c 18 Apr 2008 at 8:24 pm: Dude your speculative. You wanna be a bit more precise with your aim if your gonna throw stones

And yes it does appear yet another major UK brand fux it up by employing novices to spam for them.

Last 50 topgear posts were from:

lakeandalpine 19
vinomancat 10
clare1234 8
graemedodd 2
carguy25 1
cbshearer 1
chazgasm 1
dylanbenstead 1
Giac 1
MassMopar 1
monzadave 1
stephenams 1
wisepeace 1
yrnewfriendsam 1
zefiris2K5 1

H’m now which “ethical search engine optimisation” muppet may the BBC and TopGear have employed?
O’h that one:
http://digg.com/users/lakeandalpine

With TopGear and the BBC written on their website.
http://www.netleadz.co.uk/
esvl 19 Apr 2008 at 12:25 pm: Looks like spam to me.
Malte Landwehr 21 Apr 2008 at 8:15 pm: Even big companies like BBC (no, actually ESPECIALLY big companies like BBC) can be fooled by clueless marketers.
Webhosting Reality 27 Apr 2008 at 5:24 pm: Maybe, just maybe, BBC is outsourcing the job to dig its related site and stories.
steve 20 May 2008 at 7:53 pm: Exactly.