In the world of SEO the Holy Grail for many years has been a link from the BBC. Due to the way that search engines view the web and assign values to links from one site to another (a process which SEOmoz recently explained) sites such as the BBC, which are what might be described as trusted, or authority domains, can provide a huge boost to an SEO campaign with just one link.

Up until now links from news articles on BBC.co.uk have been relegated to side bars and have tended to be to the homepages of companies or organisations mentioned in the articles. However, as Graham at e-consultancy reports, that has now changed.

The BBC is experimenting with the idea of linking out to external sources from within the body text of its news articles, in a trial which will last for four weeks.

Graham also points out though that the way the Beeb has done this is, to put it politely, a bit of a dog’s dinner.

Take the example below. Here, clicking on the link doesn’t take you to another website – as most link-aware users expect – but instead triggers a pop-up, used to preview the Wikipedia page related to the article.

Clicking on the links within the pop-up then creates more pop-ups until, if you follow this horrible mess to its inevitable conclusion, you can’t see the original article because the whole page is covered with little Wikipedia summary boxes.

Further down in the article, which is about the British Museum’s new Hadrian exhibition, there is a link to the British Museum which, thankfully, doesn’t trigger a pop-up but actually goes direct to the British Museum’s site. But even here Auntie hasn’t been able to get it right. Rather than linking to a page giving information on the Hadrian exhibition the link takes you to the British Museum’s homepage which means that the user then has to click through the site to find the page with the information they would probably be looking for. Taking this as an example, if they wrote a piece about American Express’ profits, would they link to its homepage, which offers people the chance to take out a credit card?

This trial has undoubtedly been implemented due to a recent report by the BBC Trust which, as well as finding that BBC.co.uk had overspent by £36 million in 2007/8, also pointed out that the BBC did not do enough to link out to external sources.  It was exactly this failure to link to 3rd parties and, in particular to British sites, that was highlighted by web entrepreneur Ashley Norris (no relation I hasten to add) as one of the reasons that British blogs struggle to match the success of their counterparts in the US.

Looking at how this trial has been implemented so far, I would suggest that the BBC still has a long way to go before it counteracts the reports findings. As Graham again points out:

Most of the links I have seen so far are to well known sites like Flickr, YouTube and Wikipedia. It’s early days I guess but it is essential that the BBC links to a broader range of sources, and not just the bigger sites.

If the BBC really hope to make a success of this trial in linking to 3rd parties, they might want to try reading (and even linking to) these posts on why links bring benefit to all those involved &  why links shouldn’t open in a new window.

After all, if the BBC can promote its own content all the time, why can’t we?

Chain link image: dcJohn on flickr

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