Hi all - I have a blog post going out about this tomorrow. I pulled the short straw to respond.
Essentially, the /go/ tracking system used by the BBC to track external links is the cause of the change, as this is being implemented across the Journalism sites for related links. It changes the links in order to measure usage of external links. The BBC Trust has asked us to do this. We are adapting this to use some JavaScript to rewrite links so that they look untouched, but when clicked use the /go/ system. It's not pretty but it's the standard way to do it at BBC Towers, and it's not unusual across many sites for them to use a similar method with similar issues... Martin's posts have covered off the history of this issue admirably... Cheers, ::: John O'Donovan ::: Chief Architect, BBC FM&T Journalism ::: BBC Broadcast Centre ::: 201 Wood Lane, London W12 7TS ::: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ::: http://www.bbc.co.uk -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Dan Brickley Sent: 04 November 2008 11:18 To: backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk Subject: Re: [backstage] "Greedy BBC Blocks External Links" Gavin Pearce wrote: > ** Sorry I meant within the BBC related links section specifically. My > bad for not making it clear. > > Exactly Brian, I think we are on the same page ... my point is why does > the BBC need to make use of JavaScript, or NoFollow tags for links to > "key" sites related to the story in hand? > > End-user generated content is a different matter ... The only thing I could think of that made sense, was if the journalists were being somehow lobbied by googlejuice-crazed SEO's sending dozens of 'helpful' links or faked up stories in the hope some would end up in a highly ranked sidebar. But this seems implausible at best. BBC journalists should be pretty good at avoiding flimflam, whether SEO-inspired or otherwise. Poking around the SEO websites a bit, I can't find much evidence of that. A few posts like http://www.affiliates4u.com/forums/search-engine-strategies/12692-link-b bc-how-best-gain.html sure, but hardly enough to be worth worrying about. In my own experiments I've been crawling news.bbc.co.uk and trying to use the related link sidebar as implicit topic metadata. I reckon this holds some promise, but now it looks like custom code is needed to deal with the indirected URLs. Not a huge deal but makes the structure just that bit more gnarly... cheers, Dan -- http://danbri.org/ - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/ - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
