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Whilst reading BBC online today I thought I had accidently entered the BBC’s archive from 1998 but it seems not… apparently the Beeb’s ‘Spencer Kelly’ has just discovered that webmasters have it in their power to alter search results in Google and Yahoo!. Known professionally as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for over a decade now, I’m not sure it warrants an article in 2007 pointing out what it’s all about. Furthermore we certainly don’t need misinformed editors suggesting that the industry is full of ‘cheats’ or founded upon ‘dirty tricks’. SEO is about understanding the algorithms and weights that the likes of Google place upon a website’s access, content and link popularity - that’s all, nothing ‘dirty’. What’s next Spencer an article about the ZX81 or Commodore 64?

Almost all of Spencer’s article details the VERY old ‘miserable failure’ example (2002?) of hyperlink popularity fudging - i.e. if we get lots of websites to link to the same page using the same or similar keywords in their links, Google will push the site up the results on that term. It’s an exploitation of one factor in search engines results dictation - these days this alone is rarely enough in itself to make a major impact on search results. Spencer’s later BMW cloaking example is equally old and out of date, I was quite surprised that BMW even tried to use a cloaking technique in 2006, it certainly didn’t fool Google at the time anyway so why write about it now?

Looking up Spencer Kelly I see that his real name is ‘Spencer Bignell’ and he apparently presents a weekly BBC television programme covering news in the world of consumer technology. If this is one of his efforts to write about something topical in the area of web technology I suggest he gives up and lets somebody else produce his material. Previously the most irritating SEO article I saw coming out of a major publisher was from the Independent’s former technology edtor Chris Arthur in 2003 - my email to that editor pointing out his inaccuracies got a general ‘Nobody in the public will know I was wrong’ response. At least Spencer Kelly has ensured that the BBC isn’t factually wrong, just very behind the times.

Technorati Tags: spencer kelly, search marketing, SEO, BBC Online, Google, Yahoo, BBC Editor

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