That’s the question posed by Rednelly, with this screengrab:
Curious. Anyone at the BBC got any idea?
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I fear this is actually an abuse of google t&c´s not by the BBC, but by the company featured in the article or whoever manages ther Pay Per Click account. It´s misleading and damaging to the BBC but until pointed out by someone to Google, these sorts of abuses probably go unnoticed.
FOIA request to the BBC might be able to reveal this – http://www.bbc.co.uk/foi/
They just bought the ‘cartel’ keyword and set it to broad so even non related content shows up (and they pay huge for, since it’s not related).
@Jason – yes, I was considering that (or was hoping to help someone else to!)
@Martijn – who bought the keyword? I’m assuming not the BBC?
I suspect the purchaser of the keyword was CCR and not the BBC.
BBC would not be paying much for this – number of participants in the auction is twpo which means that the competition is very very low (I am guessing since I can’t see the right hand side but normally there would be three entries in the middle so it seems there are only the two results). First entry would pay 10p and BBC would pay slightly more than that – hardly “huge”.
I don’t understand the discussion about who bought the keyword – it’s the BBC URL in the advert copy, Google do no allow anyone to have different (apart from the deep links and query strings) destination and display URLs, I could be missing something obvious here but to me BBC are the purchasers of the keyword and it wouldn’t be costing them much at all.
Whether they want to appear for that search term is a different story (I have got zero idea what Cartel Client Review is)