Sphinn - BBC Experimenting with In-Text External Links

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BBC Experimenting with In-Text External Links

Went Hot: August 20, 2008 - 1:31 am
Posted By: kevgibbo 93 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://www.e-consultancy.com)
Category: SEO

The mainstream media are paying more attention to outbound linking, starting with a 4 week trial of "linking out to external sources from within the body text of its news articles" on the BBC.

6 Comments

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Comments

from MattKeegan 92 days ago #

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This could be huge for anyone who gets linked out by the BBC. I'll follow this trend to see if it catches on and what success people have in getting linked to.

from Kimota 92 days ago #

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Seems a bit half-hearted to me. Link love without the love.

from Mindy 92 days ago #

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Seems kind of inaccessible and unusable to me. Popups are annoying for a reason. Links should be links. Showing me a popup when I expect a link is just going to irritate me and drive me off the site faster. Showing me a popup from Wikipedia...surely the BBC should know better?

from reese 91 days ago #

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It seems like the big corps and big media can sometimes be the slowest to change to "new" (term used very sarcastically in this specific example) ways of presenting information online. It reminds me of so many corp. sites that are still using flash, or just had the flashlight go on a year ago that "there's this new-fangled flexible way of coding called CSS that we should check out."

The BBC has good authority and reputation, but that gets degraded when they practice poor inaccessibility and usability (as Mindy mentioned). I'm baffled by what appears to be their protectionist or risk-management approach to including external link. It's just a link. LOL.

from TheRealTerry 91 days ago #

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Traditional news orgs are just determined to be as stupid as possible when it comes to the web. How else can you explain such previously successful content deliverers ignoring all the common knowledge of how the internet best works even in the face of everyone telling them those failings are the exact cause of them slowing eroding into collapse? Just freaking link out guys!!! It won't kill you. It's like they are trapped in this mindset that the only way they'll lose visitors is by having an outbound link. Listen, morons, people can leave your site at any time without a link, and they are exercising that ability often when you serve usability nightmares like talking about a website without providing a link, or now giving a faux link. Sometimes it makes you just want to grab a news exec publisher by the collar and shake them around, tossing a few slaps in. Next thing you know they'll complain about Google actually driving traffic to their sites! Oh, wait... that already happened.

from MarkeD 89 days ago #

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I dunno, of course its bad for SEO for clients who have BBC links, but from an actual usability perspective I find it pretty useful. You read the article, want a brief expansion on some of its point without leaving the original article.

I notice its only the information type resources that you read in reference to the article, and direct links still exisit in the example shown (the British Museum is direct, the WIkipedia in the new "inline" style.

If the inline links are chosen carefully I can see this becoming a trend for other websites to use, not a gross misfire that rips out the heart and soul of the internet that some seem to feel ;)