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Friday, December 08, 2006

BBC Online Needs To Improve Its Search Engine Friendliness

The BBC's websites often divide opinion and stir emotions, be it angered commercial enterprises or appreciative users, there's little on the planet to match the breadth and depth of the BBC's online offering. As time goes on, they'll continue to expand their focus on the user generated content and increased web friendliness - partially because that's what they already do and partially as a result of recommendations of the Graf Report.

During the time I worked at BBC online, I learnt a lot from what is at heart a great service. But there's one area that they continue to fall down on and need to improve. Having spotted a major issue with their service today, it seemed like an apt time to do a piece on what I perceive as some of their continuing failures to improve in the area that concerns me - search engine friendliness.

Find Me If You Can...

Now, one area that continues to grow, and ticks a lot of the Graf report recommendations is their message boards, but personally I think they're selling their current batch of users short. Having spent a lot of time on the boards in the past, one thing I frequently moaned about was their outdated technology and lack of usability. Being a minion the complaints often fell on uncomprehending deaf ears, or at least ears that weren't really worried about doing anything to improve them. That's one whole ball park I'm not going to go into as frankly, the poor quality of the actual technology is not the thing that concerns me.

Condoms for mass linkingThe problems I wanted to raise here was the fact that currently, every single link on the boards is wearing a condom thanks to their robots meta tag. Hey! What! If you don't know what a link condom is, learn more here.

Why is this worthy of note? Well, it's basically rendered the whole message board system invisible to the great search engines of the world. If you can find a thread in the thousands (millions?) of threads on the site via Google or any other engine that adheres to the nofollow tag, then you're doing a better job than me.

Now, I don't know about you, but for me, some of the best information I ever got online was on message board posts I found via Google - surely you have too? Ok, we've all had some bad advice also, but being able to get it either way is important. What this nofollow robots tag does is hide the acres of good advice, opinions, tips and thoughts from being indexed by the search engines, and as a result being seen by searchers in the outside world.

Really, what they need to do is link condom the external links posted on the message boards. Then they could be seen to be doing something to avoid and thwart link spammers. More importantly, by doing this on external links only, they'd still be found by the search engines and searchers. With this blanket approach, they're fighting search spam by keeping all the best user generated content out of the search realm!

Also, let's not forget the usability issues of nofollowing all your internal links. You can't even search for a BBC Message Board thread on the BBC's own MSN Live powered search engine, because, well, Live supports nofollow. Foot, own, gun, bang...

I could be missing the point of this, it could be a potential money saving move by the BBC in these cash strapped times. I mean, think of all those extra billions of hits they'd get if people came to the site via search engines and the related bandwidth costs. Nofollowing the whole page isn't just to be seen in the message boards, I've seen this in other areas such as CBeebies.

General Lack Of Consistent SEO

I can actually brag that I've done Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for the BBC. It was very basic, I was staff and it was merely on my few pages, bit none the less I did try to practice good SEO to improve my sections rankings. As a result, I know for a fact a lot of the basics of making your pages good to go for both users and robots is severely lacking on the BBC sites. Hell, I don't think I was asked to use a H tag in 4 years of making pages for my former division - and still there's a complete lack of understanding to the importance of basic SEO practices on many of the BBC's sites.

Entire sections with the same hard-coded meta descriptions and keywords are common. So are pages bloated with table layout code and layouts lacking in headlines and semantic mark-up. Don't believe me, just look at the code on a typical BBC page before you get to any content. If I was a spider, I'd be choking on it.

I won't mention the number of times I brought up some of these issues, it was a regular bugbear of mine. It's all the more surprising given the BBC have a team dedicated to search and ranking issues, as well as talking to the major search engines about good practice and the like. To be fair, I got some great advice from their occasional talks to us and still use some of their tips now. Unfortunately, there seems to be a real disconnect between them and the page/layout designers. Things are starting to happen, but they are so far behind and with such a backlog of bad pages, I can't see this ever being improved.

External Links Rendered Pointless

Another thing the BBC is trying to do with it's websites, partially because they've been told they have too, is making them more outward looking by increasing relevant external linking. This is great if you're a webmaster as we all know the value of links from quality domains like the BBC. Over the years I have received a couple of highly relevant links to my sites from them. I should be over-joyed at this, but as a SEO aware webmaster, I most certainly ain't.

Why? Well, they're hidden behind some tracking script that renders the links invisible to the prying eyes of the search engines. Take a look at this page of external links and see what I mean. And why are they doing this. Well, to gather statistics to prove that they are doing their bit by increasing external linking. I know...

Yeah, okay, their consideration is sending traffic to external sites, I realise this, but the links I have I get maybe one or two visitors a month, which is of no real value to me. What I want is the link love, and at present, I'm not getting it! The search engines can't find any inbound links to my sites from the BBC, so the other kind of value I could get from them goes to waste. Frustratingly, BBC News give clean links to any related stories or sites.

And finally...

Ok, so maybe the BBC isn't as aware of these issues as basically, it's too big to care about them. But increasingly just this sort of head-in-the-sand approach could see them losing out to other more SEO'd media outlets. The BBC doesn't have the commercial cares of getting the volume traffic that other people need, there's not ad revenues and the like to worry about. Don't hold your breath waiting for improvements as change at BBC online is glacial.

It's important as the BBC needs to be seen to be 'the' destination for UK web surfers. Removing the nofollow could instantly create millions of new impressions via the search engines once the material is indexed for starters. That's one consideration, but more important again is usability.

Addressing these issues could have a big impact on usability issues related to search and finding things at the site both internally and externally. Let's face it, if it was a toss-up between researching something via the BBC or Wikipedia, I know which one I'd prefer to trust. Increasingly though, Wikipedia is sitting on top of the search results where the BBC should be, and it's missing out on both mind share and traffic. It's not a lot to ask to make things better, after all, that's what we're paying for.

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Posted by Dio Bach at 1:32 PM  

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