The BBC have announced plans to ‘close or archive’ notable sec­tions of their web­site includ­ing BBC Food, News­beat, News Mag­a­zine and iWon­der.

The most sig­nif­i­cant of the cuts will see the entire recipes sec­tion of their web­site tak­en offline. Alas, no longer will bud­ding bak­ers be able to find Mary Berry’s clas­sic recipe for Tarte au cit­ron (at least on the BBC web­site).

Evi­dent­ly the BBC recipes are much loved, and there was an imme­di­ate pub­lic out­cry yes­ter­day (on the day of the announce­ment). At the time of writ­ing, a Change.org peti­tion call­ing to “Save the BBC’s recipe archive!” has amassed over 170,000 sig­na­tures.

This extent of the back­lash prompt­ed the BBC to address the issue fur­ther, and it’s now emerg­ing that the archive is like­ly to be moved to BBC Good Food, one of the the UK’s lead­ing recipe web­sites (owned by the BBC but not itself part of the Cor­po­ra­tion). As Dan Bark­er wrote, this may have been the inten­tion all along, and the move could poten­tial­ly mean the move­ment of a high­ly lucra­tive selec­tion of con­tent from a non-prof­it mak­ing con­text into a prof­it-mak­ing one.

Many ques­tions remain unan­swered, but just how much the BBC Recipe archive is worth from a dig­i­tal and SEO per­spec­tive — and what they stand to lose — is a top­ic worth explor­ing.

Unprecedented Culling

From an SEO per­spec­tive, this kind of ‘culling’ is a com­plete­ly unprece­dent­ed move — hav­ing asked a few sea­soned SEO friends if they could recall any oth­er instance of a huge and author­i­ta­tive domain, vol­un­tar­i­ly culling a sig­nif­i­cant part of their web­site like this, we drew a blank.

The actions, which are per­haps moti­vat­ed by com­pe­ti­tion con­cerns, are sur­pris­ing in that such a deci­sion is almost nev­er made by brands or dig­i­tal pub­lish­ers, at least not with­out a sig­nif­i­cant effort to pre­serve audi­ence or site equi­ty.

As a result this is a unique oppor­tu­ni­ty to analyse the impact of the BBC’s actions from a com­pet­i­tive and SEO per­spec­tive. In par­tic­u­lar, we’re going to look at how and what the BBC stands to lose by dis­solv­ing the recipes and food sec­tion of the site, how this may affect the search land­scape, and which com­peti­tors oper­at­ing in the space are best posi­tioned to gain.

BBC Food by the numbers

We’re going to look specif­i­cal­ly at BBC Food, as this is the sec­tion that the Cor­po­ra­tion has stat­ed is like­ly to be tak­en off the BBC web­site com­plete­ly.

In a nut­shell, here’s what the /food sec­tion of the bbc.co.uk web­site is worth to the BBC, as of this month:

• Pages in this sec­tion receive an esti­mat­ed 326k vis­its per month, from organ­ic search.
• Those vis­its are dis­trib­uted across 6,894 pages (although our crawls sug­gest that upwards of 30,000 URLs exist in this site sec­tion).
• If pur­chased via Google AdWords, those clicks would cost an esti­mat­ed £97.6k.

For the intents of this study, we exclud­ed pages from food pro­gram­ming (/food/programmes) as these are expect­ed to be pre­served.

Content and pages

The BBC Food sec­tion doesn’t only con­tain recipes — there are numer­ous cat­e­go­ry, tax­on­o­my and archive pages which allow users to browse by ingre­di­ent, chef, cui­sine type, occa­sions (such as food for Father’s Day) and oth­er options. It’s our expec­ta­tions that these pages will also be archived or removed in line with the recipes they sup­port — sug­gest­ing that there’s much more at stake here than a hand­ful of recipe pages.

Of all these pages, 77.7% per­cent are com­prised of recipes, which are sup­port­ed by addi­tion­al pages con­tain­ing infor­ma­tion­al con­tent about ingre­di­ents (i.e. /food/crostini), tech­niques (/food/techniques), and chefs (/food/chefs).

Here’s how each sec­tion of the site breaks down by share of the total esti­mat­ed traf­fic that each sec­tion receives from organ­ic search:

As you can see, the recipes them­selves draw the lion’s share of the esti­mat­ed traf­fic with 71.5% of the total (229,556 est. vis­i­tors), and ingre­di­ents bring­ing in 23.1% (74,287 est. vis­i­tors).

Rankings and Visibility

BBC recipe pages are well known for being high­ly vis­i­ble in the search results. But just how vis­i­ble are they? The fol­low­ing graph shows the rank­ing dis­tri­b­u­tion across /food.

In total 2,759 of 6,894, or 40 per­cent, of all traf­fic gain­ing pages in the /food sec­tion rank in a top ten posi­tion when users make rel­e­vant search­es. This dis­tri­b­u­tion shows that a large amount of the con­tent which cur­rent­ly exists on this site is of a suf­fi­cient­ly high qual­i­ty to con­sis­tent­ly rank high­ly (in the top 10 results). These are strong pages, with good con­tent, which per­form well.

Power Pages

As you might expect from the strength of these rank­ings, the BBC has a num­ber of high­ly author­i­ta­tive pages rank­ing for high vol­ume com­pet­i­tive key­words, and nat­u­ral­ly draw­ing a high vol­ume of vis­its.

The top ten pages include recipes for sweet scones, chick­en kor­ma, prof­iteroles, and may­on­naise.

When we fac­tor in media val­ue, we get an idea of what the BBC web­site stands to lose from some of their most valu­able pages. Accord­ing to our cal­cu­la­tions, the most valu­able indi­vid­ual page in the food sec­tion is the recipe page for cia­bat­ta (worth an esti­mat­ed £8,593 per month in media val­ue), fol­lowed by a page col­lat­ing pan­cake recipes for pan­cake day (worth an esti­mat­ed £4,330 per month in media val­ue).

At scale, these pages rep­re­sent lucra­tive con­tent, which com­mer­cial web­sites could eas­i­ly mon­e­tise through adver­tis­ing or affil­i­ate prod­uct sales.

Competitor Landscape

At present /food wins a sig­nif­i­cant share of online vis­its for recipes and infor­ma­tion­al cook­ing con­tent online. Much has been dis­cussed as to whether com­peti­tors will now be able to step in and cap­i­tal­ize on the clos­ing down of /food.

At present, there are a num­ber of ded­i­cat­ed recipe com­peti­tors (exclud­ing web­sites and brands which offer recipes as an exten­sion of oth­er ser­vices, e.g., super­mar­kets) oper­at­ing the the UK food and recipes mar­ket, which are per­haps best posi­tioned to cap­i­tal­ize.

BBC Good Food is the largest recipes site in the UK, so assum­ing the con­tent is migrat­ed smooth­ly, it should cement its posi­tion as the lead­ing author­i­ty in the space. To put their lead into con­text, even if sec­ond placed com­peti­tor jamieoliver.com were, hypo­thet­i­cal­ly, able to cap­i­tal­ize on all of the equi­ty of BBC recipes, they would still trail in sheer traf­fic to BBC Good Food by sev­er­al mil­lion vis­its a month.

Final thoughts

The BBC recipe archive is undoubt­ed­ly pop­u­lar and much loved by the British pub­lic, and the removal of the resource will result in a notice­able loss in traf­fic and val­ue for the bbc.co.uk domain.

“For us, what’s par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ing here are the par­al­lels between the BBC’s (poten­tial­ly) polit­i­cal deci­sion to make large-scale changes to their web­site with a seem­ing lack of con­sid­er­a­tion for the impact to their SEO (and to their vis­i­tors), and the kinds of deci­sions we often see senior deci­sion mak­ers in large organ­i­sa­tions ini­ti­at­ing.

Many SEO agen­cies and prac­ti­tion­ers will have hor­ror sto­ries of how their busi­ness­es’ com­mer­cial and polit­i­cal pres­sures force changes to site struc­tures, con­tent and strate­gies — fre­quent­ly in a way which fails to opti­mal­ly con­sid­er the impact on exist­ing, and poten­tial future SEO per­for­mance.
So when your com­peti­tors, or oth­er large play­ers in the mar­ket make these kinds of shifts, the smart play­ers make sure that they’re pre­pared to take advan­tage of the gaps these deci­sions cre­ate.”

Brands com­pet­ing in this mar­ket­place face a unique oppor­tu­ni­ty to mobilise their con­tent, out­reach and mar­ket­ing strate­gies. Those who use this kind of data to iden­ti­fy tac­ti­cal oppor­tu­ni­ties, quick­ly, will be able to mop up on some of the traf­fic and brand equi­ty which the BBC will inevitably lose as a result of this deci­sion. That could shift the bal­ance of pow­er in the mar­ket, and rep­re­sent a sig­nif­i­cant com­mer­cial win.

Hav­ing worked close­ly with peo­ple who worked on the food site, it is sad to see the invest­ment in research, plan­ning and care tak­en to pro­duce a resource of con­tent that was pas­sion­ate­ly loved – with pan­cake day actu­al­ly being a spike in traf­fic for the BBC (the sim­ple pan­cake recipe from BBC always came first)!

in 2011 the BBC team pro­duced a visu­al­i­sa­tion of the research they had been con­duct­ing to under­stand what to pub­lish through the year – this visu­al­i­sa­tion shows the vol­ume of data avail­able.

I am fail­ing to under­stand what is actu­al­ly hap­pen­ing with this archive, but it seems that mov­ing and archiv­ing the con­tent seems more chal­leng­ing than the nor­mal approach which is just to ignore it.

The recipes attract about 2% of the over­all traf­fic to the BBC.co.uk site how­ev­er, this it is impres­sive ever­green con­tent which shouldn’t require the lev­el of invest­ment in main­te­nance that news and sport require.

Methodology

Using the Linkdex plat­form, we con­duct­ed a domain lev­el crawl of the entire www.bbc.co.uk domain, and inves­ti­gat­ed the /food direc­to­ry, where all of the recipe and food con­tent cur­rent­ly resides.

Linkdex’s vis­i­bil­i­ty tools allow you to see the key­words peo­ple are using when they find pages in the Food sec­tion of the BBC web­site, and where those pages rank in the search results. This, com­bined with our pro­pri­etary click­through rate mod­el­ling for each rank­ing posi­tion, pro­vides us with an esti­ma­tion of the traf­fic which those pages receive each month.

Using this fig­ure, we cal­cu­lat­ed an esti­mat­ed media val­ue for each page, by mul­ti­ply­ing the esti­mat­ed vis­its for each page in ques­tion by the cost-per-click (Google AdWords) of each key­word it ranks for. This is a use­ful proxy for under­stand­ing how much the mar­ket val­ues those key­words, which cor­re­lates with their com­mer­cial val­ue (and the abil­i­ty of web­sites and busi­ness­es to con­vert search­es for those key­words into sales or cus­tomers).