One BBC problem is too much transparency. Write a blog post about paid links on the BBC and they’ll happily link to it. I continue to believe there is no official policy to sell links on the BBC and I’ve yet to see compelling evidence that rogue admins are selling links.
On the other hand what the hell is this (care of Greg Dickson)?
Odd BBC “sport site” link to carrentals.co.uk
This is a link to a car rental website in the “From other sport sites” section of this story today about the England game.
That link is one of the automated ones that are generated via Moreover for the BBC – but  it goes via a series of weird redirects to the site in question. The actual link is to: http://c.moreover.com/click/here.pl?z4032419548&z=1250248769 which goes via a 302 redirect (invisibly via http://www.bbc.co.uk/go/redirect.shtml?http://c.moreover.com/click/here.pl?z4032419548&z=1250248769?z4032419548&z=1250248769) to the carrentals.co.uk site.
There are two issues here:
- The BBC isn’t linking out fairly. 302 redirects don’t pass link value in Google’s eyes. If the BBC links to sites, it should link to them properly not via weird links that don’t count to Google. It promised to stop doing these odd redirected links in 2008. Why’s it still going on?
- Also, why the hell is it linking to carrentals.co.uk as a sports site? The Moreover feed needs cleaning up.
Fortunately, the transparency of the BBC means we’ll find out soon no doubt …!
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