If you add "nofollow" to a link (in the HTML code), it tells search engines to ignore the link - so the site you link to gets no SEO benefit from the link. The BBC has now lived up to its promise to provide links without nofollow to people who blog about its TV programmes (Update although see the points in the comments about the redirects ...).

Last December, I pointed out that:

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.

The BBC replied that:

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.

The old Shownar

It's now followed through on that with its about to go live Buzz service, explained here (cheers to Martin Belam for the spot):

We've built a tool that finds where on blogs, Twitter and other online communities people are discussing BBC programmes, and presents links to them on the relevant programme page.

If people are talking about a programme, a section called 'Buzz about this programme' appears on its programme page. Clicking on the links in that section will take you to online conversations about that programme.

As to how the links work, that's explained here - the bit about nofollow reads:

We use an automated system to find our blog links which means if you link to a BBC programme page and your blog passes our external link guidelines we will usually link to it. This opens us up to possible abuse with people linking to us just to boost their page's search positioning. To counter this we add a nofollow tag to pages we've looked at and decided are not fully relevant within the context of the programme (find out how we judge relevancy here). We don't put this restriction on relevant posts, so if the post is very much about the programme and not trying to gain search positioning it does get the authority from us.

Please note we only check blog post relevancy during office hours and it may take a while to get through any backlogs that have built up. So if your blog is recent, relevant and has the nofollow tag it may just because we've not checked it yet.

Anyway (1) well done the BBC (this presumably counts as part of its promise to double monthly clickthroughs to external sites) and (2) I must go and write about some BBC programmes (don't forget this tip to get links from the BBC to your Twitter page) ...

As far as I can tell, the new service isn't live yet as I can't find it anywhere on the BBC site. Let me know if you spot it ...

Want a job as SEO manager at the Daily Mail? Check out their robots.txt file (just don't tell them you saw it here ...). In the middle it says:

# August 12th, MailOnline are looking for a talented SEO Manager so if you found this you're the kind of techie we need!

Daily Mail's robots.txt file contains an SEO job advert

Genius! You could also contact Mail Online MD James Bromley on Twitter.

For those who don't know, the robots.txt file is how you tell search engines which pages they can and can't crawl on your site to include in their index.

In the past it was worth occasionally checking out newspapers' robots.txt files as they listed the URLs of stories that they've had to withdraw for legal reasons (or joke Polish editions). Sadly, they don't seem to do that so much these days (and they'd get lost in the Mirror's massive file). Plus there's no easy way to check if they've been updated - Google Reader's ability to track changing webpages doesn't work with robots.txt files. Boo.

If you liked this post, I've got lots more about SEO (try this story analysing Google's keywords tool). I also blog about newspapers a lot - such as the Daily Mail (this story was popular recently on iDosing) and lately a lot about the Times paywall.

Fresh from pointing out the problems with Google's keywords tool, here's why they need to sort out the list of hot UK search topics in Google Trends. Here's the top 10 at 5pm on Friday (surely the best time to blog, no?).

1. 

   Google Trends: UK hot topics. All very US.

   gm ipo - an American company is selling shares.

2. elias abuelazam - a Michigan, America, based serial stabber.
3. call of duty black ops - I'll give it this one.
4. border security bill - the passing of a US bill by Obama.
5. javier mascherano - they can have this.
6. iowa flood - it's a flood. In Iowa. In the USA.
7. wifi - Er, not sure.
8. us retail sales - Retails sales. In the USA.
9. terror babies - Stupid US conspiracy theory.
10. steven slater - A flight attendant who went off on one. An American flight attendant.

It's like this every day. Please fix. (And if you thought this was bad, check out Bing XRank's problems)

The internet is full of advice to use Google's keyword tool to work out what search terms to optimise for. Here's why you shouldn't do this - and what you can use instead.

On the face of it, Google's tool looks promising. You put in a keyword or search term you're interested in (perhaps because you want to know what words to use in a headline or what tags or sub-category names to use in your navigation). You get a list of related keywords. And you can see how many searches there are for each one. You then know which are the most popular - and can target those.

Except you shouldn't do this. Here's why.

Karen Gillan

Let's start with Karen Gillan, who plays Amy Pond in Doctor Who.

Logged out

If you use the keyword tool when you're logged out, you see this - and a warning to "Sign in with your AdWords login info to see the full set of ideas for this search" (the tool is free - but you have to register and log in to see all the data):

Karen Gillan logged out

(All these screenshots are based on google.co.uk searches (though see the warning at the end of this post) with a phrase match type - ie any searches which includes the words shown in the quote marks in that order.)

Logged in

Log in, and you see this:

Karen Gillan logged in

Annoyingly with a phrase search, the straightforward term you entered ("Karen Gillan" here) isn't showing.

But more importantly, as you can see by comparing the two screenshots, the logged out version of the tool didn't show you the most popular search term with the phrase "Karen Gillan" in - namely "Karen Gillan underwear" (nice).

Logged out again ...

You can force the logged-out tool to show you the result for "karen gillan underwear" by searching for that specific term:

Karen Gillan underwear - logged out

Comparing logged in and logged out

Now, fair enough, there was a warning to log in to see all the relevant keywords. But if you've been paying attention, you'll have noticed something a bit odd about the search volumes

Logged in:

• Karen Gillan underwear - 1,900
• Karen Gillan pictures - 590

Logged out:

• Karen Gillan underwear - 9,900
• Karen Gillan pictures - 3,600

The numbers aren't the same. But I suppose they're at least out by about six times each, so the same order of magnitude ...

Only, that's not always the case.

Jennifer Aniston

Let's look at Jennifer Aniston.

Logged out

If you're logged out, you see these results:

Jennifer Aniston logged out

Logged in

If you log in, you see these results instead:

Jennifer Aniston logged in

You should notice two things. First, "Jennifer Aniston pregnant" is at number two when you're logged in, with 18,100 searches a month. This search term didn't show when we were logged out, but fair enough, there was that warning to log in to see the full set of results.

But, secondly, the numbers don't match again. When logged out, "Jennifer Aniston's hair" was shown as having 60,500 searches a month. When logged in, there are only apparently 12,100 searches a month.

Logged out again

Again, you can make the missing search terms appear when you're logged out if you know what they are by typing them in the box. If we do that, we get this for "Jennifer Aniston pregnant":

Jennifer Aniston pregnant - logged out

Comparing logged in and logged out

To sum up, we're looking at these numbers:

Logged in

• Jennifer Aniston pregnant - 18,100
• Jennifer Aniston hair - 12,100

Logged out

• Jennifer Aniston pregnant - 49,500
• Jennifer Aniston hair - 60,500

It's not just that the numbers are different, they are in a different order. When logged in, the tool says people search for pregnant 1.5 times as much as hair. When logged out, hair is 20% more popular than pregnant.

What Google News thinks

To make matters worse, if you go to Google News and start typing Jennifer Aniston's name, you see this in the Autosuggest feature - which is supposed to show you what people are searching for right now:

Jennifer Aniston - Google News autocomplete

There's no mention of hair, and "Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt" is more popular than pregnant - even though when logged in, the keywords tool told us that people were twice as likely to search for her pregnant (18,100 searches) as with Brad Pitt (9,900 searches).

Katie Price

Here's a similar story.

Logged in

This is what you see when you search on Katie Price's name logged in:

Katie Price logged in

Logged out

And here are the logged out figures for two search terms.

Katie Price and Peter Andre:

Katie Price and Peter Andre - logged out

Katie Price video:

Katie Price video - logged out

Comparing logged in and logged out

Compare the figures again:

Logged in - the same:

• Katie Price and Peter Andre - 14,800
• Katie Price video - 14,800

Logged out - one is 50% higher than the other

• Katie Price and Peter Andre - 40,500
• Katie Price video - 27,100

When you're logged in, the tool says the search volumes are the same. When you're logged out, it says there's 50% more searches for "Katie Price and Peter Andre" than there are for Katie Price video.

What Google News thinks

Go to Google News, and you can see that the current second most popular Google Autocomplete is Katie Price pregnant - behind "Katie Price and Peter Andre" and with Katie Price video nowhere to be seen.

Katie Price Autocomplete in Google News

When you're logged in, though, the number of searches for Katie Price pregnant is negligible:

Katie Price pregnant - logged in

Which means that the term people are searching for right now, according to Google News, isn't even worth looking at according to the keyword tool.

What all this means

You can't trust the logged-out version of the tool, as it doesn't show you everything.

The search volumes you see for a specific search term are different when logged in or logged out. I've seen a supposition that, when logged out, you see total search volumes but when logged in you see searches that triggered an Adwords ad. This would make the logged-in version of the tool useless for SEO, as what it's showing you is determined by PPC budgets (when the money's spend, there are no more Adwords ads, so those searches are ignored). Alternatively, it's just a bug as suggested here. Either way, the data is screwy.

However, you shouldn't trust this data anyway, even if it was unscrewy, as the Adwords tool doesn't show search volumes. It shows "the approximate 12-month average of user queries for the keyword on Google.co.uk and the Google Search Network". This basically means it's counting EG adwords panels on parked domains as "searches" - and inflating the search volumes.

Even if you did trust it, for the search terms above, which do tend to be fairly newsy, I'll give you, the Adwords keywords tool isn't reflecting what people are searching for now.

To sum up - the data's odd, inconsistent, and out of date. Don't use it.

Well, what shall I use?

To decide what to optimise pages for, I tend to use a combination of Google Insights, Google Autocomplete for web searches and Google Autocomplete for News. The latter have their issues (such as these).

But by plugging what you see from the Autocomplete data into Google Insights, I think you get a much better picture of what people are really searching for. If you're up to APIs and stuff, rather than copying what you see, you can automate the autocomplete discovery. Or you can use this awesome keyword discovery tool that does the same thing (hat-tip to @rishil).

Having enjoyed the genius that is the Old Spice social media / YouTube campaign, I idly wondered how quickly someone would grab the silverfishhandcatch.com domain - apparently very quickly.

The link to the video below was tweeted by @oldspice at about 8am UK time. Silverfishhandcatch.com was registered at 7.30am - so about 2.30pm UK time, or a mere 6.5 hours later.

Silver Fish Hand Catch . com

Here's the video:

And here's what on earth I'm on about - read this, which is an explanation, and then this, which analyses its popularity.

Silver fish hand catch, as Isaiah Mustafa would say at this point.

One way to keep your website pages out of Google's index is to use a robots.txt file - this tells search engines where they can and can't go (which folders are "disallowed").

Bing has quite an extensive one, telling other search engines not to waste their time ploughing through its search results.

Unfortunately, when Bing launched www.bing.com/social (Bing's combined search of Facebook and Twitter updates) back in June, it forgot (I presume) to update its robots.txt file (which had previously, and still does, disallow results from the more limited forerunner -  bing.com/twitter).

As a result, a search for raoul gazza gascoigne in Google returns Bing social search results pages at the top.

Bing search results pages are, er, top of Google's search results

And while Google's site search operator isn't that accurate, it appears to suggest that it has indexed 168,000 pages of Bing search results in the last month or so.

A lot of Bing social pages are in Google's index

None of which explains why Google considers a search results page from one of its competitors full of recycled tweets and updates to be the most relevant results ...

The Sun decided last week to run a story about the false rumours circulating about Steven Gerrard:

SEX slurs claiming England's World Cup hopes were undermined by a player's fling with a teenage girl are a sick HOAX, The Sun can reveal.

Thousands of fans have received texts and emails saying captain Steven Gerrard had got wife Alex Curran's 16-year-old sister pregnant.

But the lies are blown apart by one crucial fact - model Alex, 27, does not even HAVE a sister.

(I love the justification here for running a story about a rumour: people are receiving texts and emails. Makes it sound link some sort of conspiracy as opposed to people just emailing their friends ...)

Anyway, I don't know what Gerrard's lawyers made of this story but they might want to have a word with Google. If you get as far as typing Steven Gerrard into Google News, the auto complete function throws up this list ...

Google's autocomplete for "Steven Gerrard"

Unlike the Sun's story, the list isn't peppered with provisos that none of this is true.

The Guardian has poked some fun at the Edinburgh Fringe website for banning people linking to it in its terms and conditions. This is more than a year after I revealed that most newspapers banned deep links, as did brands like Apple, Royal Mail, Channel 4 and, er, the Association of Online Publishers (most of those subsequently removed the offending clause after I pointed it out).

All that culminated in the hilarity of my attempts to get the Royal Mail to post me the paper licence they insisted I needed to link to them.

But here are some more sites that still think they can - or should - ban people linking to them in their terms and conditions of use. YOU ARE ALL CLOWNS.

Independent: "Third parties must not deep-link to, or frame or use other techniques to enclose any part of the Website."

Vodafone: "You, and any persons you allow to use the Service or the Content through your access to the Service, are not allowed to: -  ... include or create links (including deep-links) to or from the Content and/or the Service;"

Ticketmaster: "You also agree not to deep-link to the site for any purpose, unless specifically authorised by Ticketmaster to do so."

TimeOut Tickets: "You also agree not to deep-link to the site for any purpose, unless specifically authorised by TimeOutTickets.com to do so."

Kent Online: "You also agree not to deep-link or frame to the site for any purpose, unless authorised by KM Group."

News International jobs: "Illegal and/or unauthorized use of the Services, including ... linking to the Website is prohibited."

Anglo Irish bank: " Any unauthorised linking to this Site is also strictly prohibited. Please note that ... linking to it may be in breach of statutory or common law rights which could be the subject of legal action."

The new Times website: "Illegal and/or unauthorized use of the Services, including ... linking to the Website is prohibited. " (Well, there is a paywall I guess ...!)

Easyjet: "You are permitted to provide and maintain a Link to the easyJet Website Homepage only at URL http://www.easyjet.com. You may not direct the Link to any other webpage contained within the easyJet Website.

Jimmy Choos: "Unless authorised in writing by JCL, JCL expressly prohibits linking of any part of this Site to or from any other Sites (including so-called "deep-linking")."

Thanks to Chris Coltrane for pointing out the Guardian link.

The government is to close 600 websites in order to save £100 million it was announced last week - including the lovechips.co.uk site run by the marketing department of the Potato Council to encourage us to stuff our faces with fat-soaked portions of starchy foods with no real nutritional value.

Chips: fattening

Poking around a bit, it soon became clear that:

1. The government is lying about the saving
2. The people who commissioned this website are idiots.
3. This website should have been shut a long time ago for lying

The government is lying about the saving

The lovechips site is run by the Potato Council, a division of the Agriculture & Horticulture Development Board (AHBD). (I like the Potato Council website - at the bottom it says "If you can read this your browser is standards complient". I don't really like it - as well as being bad at spelling, it's awful.)

Anyway, the AHBD  is funded by a statutory levy on producers, growers and processors. Although its chief exec's £150k salary (plus £30k bonus) used to be paid by Defra, this arrangement was stopped after 2008 according to the last annual report.

Which means that (1) the government has no real power to shut the lovechips site and (2) if it was shut, any saving would benefit AHBD and not the government at all - so it could not form part of any efficiency saving that could go towards reducing the budget deficit.

The people who commissioned this website are idiots

Love chips website

It might be AHBD's money, but it's still a waste of money. For instance, here is a page to find a chip shop in London. Apparently there are 5 chip shops in London (Update: there are 6 I see. Lambeth is listed separately to London).

There is also the lamest game ever. Honsestly - I challenge you to find one lamer than this.

In some ways they are getting value for money, as if you go to lovechips.com you can see the whole site all over again. Actually, they are framing the .co.uk site - so as you move around the .com version, the URL at the top stays as lovechips.com, making it impossible to copy any URLs to link to. Try it. (They're not really getting value for money - I was kidding).

A chip on my shoulder about their poor SEO

If we do a site: search on Google, we can see how their pages look. As you can see, the HTML titles of their pages (the bit of meta data that the website owner sets and which Google shows in its results) are mostly meaningless. Pages like "Scotland" look fairly ridiculous in Google's results - who would imagine you would click a page called "Scotland" and get a list of chip shops?

Then there's the page called "Chip Inspector", which has some chip films, none of which appear to involve inspectors.

Anyway, I'm not really sure of the point of the lovechips site. But the people who built it also built the Love potatoes site and did some SEO on that:

"Allies Design worked with GPMD [some other agency] on a Search Engine Optimisation strategy which we implemented through the design and content of the site. Within just 5 months of launching the new site, we'd more than doubled the number of visitors through Google every month."

I'm not going to comment on the meaningless of this statement (EG was it from 1 to 2 visitors?). But you'd have thought that they would set up the HTML titles properly so that the pages looked sensible in Google (and so that Google could work out what they were about). Maybe I do them an injustice and they gave some very clear rules but the potato people couldn't get their heads round them? Or the Alt text for images, which is also very poor. Or the fact that meta descriptions are missing from nearly all the pages?

Either way, I'm not sure how both the design agency and GPMD persuaded the potato lot that they should both have a design / build credit link at the bottom of every page. Or why they felt they would want one.

One measure of its success would be traffic I guess. I'm not fan of the accuracy of Alexa's data, but it will have to do for the lovechips site. Apparently it's the 2,553,642nd most visited site in the world. Which given this blog is the 136,515th according to Alexa is pretty lame.

Oh, and as for the lies ...

According to the lovechips site, chips are healthy:

Chips are rich in vitamin C which scientists say can help fight off cancer

There is also a panel that says "Click here to find out why chips have all the goodness of potatoes!" However, according to the Food Standard's Agency's Eat Well site:

Potatoes ... don't count towards our [five-a-day] daily fruit and veg portions ... And although potatoes don’t contain much vitamin C compared to other vegetables, in Britain we get a lot of our daily vitamin C from them because we eat so many of them.

Conclusion

So there we have it. It lies about the nutritional value of potatoes. The people who commissioned it don't know or care that hardly anyone visits it. But shutting it down won't save us a penny.