Following the recent changes to the BBC news website there has been some talk in the SEO community about the affect this has had.
A tweet from @tomcritchlow of Distilled this morning had me wondering how the transition to the new site was going:
I first noticed that the PR of the new www.bbc.co.uk/news website is currently 0 – though this is understandable as the PR updates are fairly infrequent. It’s interesting though that a 301 redirect doesn’t transfer the PR value of the original source page?
Next – I thought I’d take a look at the cached page that Google have for the new home page to see how recent it was. Here’s the surprising result:
Odd? Are Google not indexing the new home page? A check of their robots.txt file didn’t show any problems?
Looking at the robots.txt file – I noticed that the news site has it’s on sitemap:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news_sitemap.xml
Looking through the contents of this file – it looks like there are entries for most languages on the site – but oddly I could not see English in the list?
Is this an oversight or are the BBC just relying on in-links and internal linking to ensure that Google indexes the site.
Here’s the (albeit rough) stats from Google on the number of pages of each site in their index:
Quite a difference! It’ll be interesting to follow this over the next week to see how the figures change.
What was also interesting was the pages shown in the index. For the old site, the home page and the top category pages are showing top of the list:
However for the new site – only deeper article pages are shown, which matches what I saw earlier with the home page not showing in the Google cache.
We’ll have to keep an eye on the results over the next few days to see how the statistics change. It’s certainly a brave move on behalf of the BBC to undertake such a widespread restructuring and maybe the results will help others in similar situations?