BBC hoodwinks bloggers with promises of links
Shownar is a BBC site that tracks online buzz about BBC shows. Despite being paid for by the licence fee, it's pulling the wool over bloggers' eyes by claiming that, if you link to it, it will link back - but it's nofollowing the links.
Shownar: promises links but nofollows them
The site tracks - and links to - what people are blogging and tweeting about BBC shows and episodes (like Doctor Who) so you can see what's hot. You get the idea.
Excitingly for bloggers who struggle to get many links to their site, Shownar says:
If you’re discussing BBC shows, just link to us and we’ll link to you (subject to the checks below). It’s as simple as that.
And these checks?
Shownar automatically creates sets of links to blogs discussing every show on the BBC. We want the links to reflect everything that’s going on about a show, not select a favoured few, but that’s not to say we don’t check them before they go on the site. We do.
So the BBC encourages you to link to it. If you do, it checks out your site and, if it approves it, it links back.
And then it prevents Google and other search engines from counting that link by slapping nofollow on the link.
Nofollow explained
What is nofollow? To quote Google:
When Google sees the attribute (rel="nofollow") on hyperlinks, those links won't get any credit when we rank websites in our search results.
Whats it for? It's main aim is to avoid linking to sites you can't vouch for, or for links which aren't "natural" in some way. So most URLs in comments are automatically nofollowed by blogging software to try to defeat spammers. And if someone pays you for a link, you can use nofollow to make sure Google doesn't penalise you.
There is a third use for nofollow - to try and do better in Google's results by not linking properly to other sites (or to avoid helping them in Google's results).
All the links Shownar promises are nofollowed
You can't tell the links are nofollowed by looking at the webpage - you have to look at the HTML (although in this screenshot, I've shown the nofollowed links - ie all of them - with pink).
The BBC should either make them standard links - or be much more transparent about its "you link to us and we'll link to you" statement by making clear they aren't normal links.
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Cool post. Did you ask Auntie why she does this?
I was hoping maybe she's swing by and explain herself ...
Hello Auntie here
Our decision to add nofollow to these links was to avoid spam and people gaming our site. For the Shownar prototype we are running on a very low moderation staffing level as Shownar's primary aim was to experiment with different ideas and see how feeds and data performed in the real world. We could not afford to deal with spammers who make use of our largely automated link back to gain extra 'google juice' and exposure from our site.
Generally the BBC isn’t a fan of nofollow but we followed the lead of sites that can be gamed by spammers (eg Twitter and Flickr) who do use it.
Shownar will be retired in a few weeks. The good news is the version we are creating for bbc.co.uk is going to be backed by the moderation support that means we should be able to remove nofollows for those non-commerical blog posts that are significantly about a BBC programme.
Andrew Barron
Product Manager, Shownar
Hi, Andrew, thanks for the explanation. I guess the difference between you and Twitter, say, is that it doesn't do site-level moderation.
Anyway, good to know you're looking to remove the nofollow in future. Cheers.
that does seem to rather undermine the spirit of the thing... have you tried getting an explanation yet?
ah sorry - must have had an old window open and didn't notice the comments. Ignore my last comment!
Andrew - I see you've followed through on this promise with the new Buzz thingamybob. Am blogging about this for the morning - is Buzz live though? I can see the "about Buzz" pages but can't find an example ...
[...] December, I pointed out that: Shownar is a BBC site that tracks online buzz about BBC shows. Despite being paid for by the [...]
It's getting there. We are waiting for the team who run bbc.co.uk/programmes/ to make some changes that will put it live. Hopefully it will be in the next two weeks but it's part of a release with a number of other dependencies so I cannot say for definite. They'll be a post on the BBC Internet Blog when it launches.
Thanks for the comment. I've found some URLs! However, as you'll see in the new blog post comments (http://www.malcolmcoles.co.uk/blog/bbc-dofollow-bloggers/#comments), there's a weird redirect going on that's effectively the same as a nofollow. Anyway, apparently it's being looked into at your end ...