4 in 6 Media outlets more likely to link to the Conservative Party than the Labour Party.
LABOUR receives 2.5 times fewer links to their webpage from the BBC than Conservatives.
News Outlets were 150% more likely to link to Conservatives than Labour
BBC and the Guardian more likely to link to the Lib Dems than Labour.
Currently trending on Twitter and in the media, #BBCImpartiality is under scrutiny. As experts in all things digital, Rebootonline.com decided to look for online data that hints at signs of party partiality among media outlets – and discovered that the media could be helping certain party websites get better visibility on Google.
The full set of data collected on various digital metrics can be found visualised here:
https://www.rebootonline.com/digital-elections/
Initially, Rebootonline.com analysed the websites for each major political party (Conservatives, Labour, Liberal Democrats, SNP, The Brexit Party and Green Party). Looking at ‘referring domains’ (that is, the number of websites that link to each Party’s site) it was clear to see that both the Conservative Party and Labour Party had the most links pointing to them from other websites around the internet.
Labour outranks the Conservative opposition by about 1,100 links. The other parties receive far fewer links to them, with the Lib Dems having around 7,900 domains referring to their site, followed by Green Party (6,600), SNP (4,200) and the relatively new website from the Brexit Party (1,800).
Interested to see how many of these domains were from media outlets, and then how many times each outlet links to each party, Rebootonline.com did a little more digital digging.
LINKS FROM THE PRESS
Rebootonline.com analysed how many times media outlets are linking to each political party’s website with different types of links. The main focus was ‘follow’ links. A ‘follow’ link is where one site is telling Google that they trust the website they are linking to, and that they want to transfer some authority to the site. Follow links help a website rank better in Google. This is important as we can see a disparity in linking strategies from different newspapers. It can be deduced that a follow link acts as a vote of confidence, making it interesting to see which parties are being linked to the most, and by whom.
Analysis revealed that 4 in 6 news outlets were more likely to link to the Conservative Party than the Labour Party. 2 in 6 were more likely to link to the Liberal Democrats’ website, and only one news site (The Independent) out of 6 was more likely to link to labour.
Conservatives are 150% more likely to receive a link to their website in a news article than the Labour party.
The largest disparity in linking came from the BBC – who are 2.5 times more likely to link to Conservative than Labour. Indeed, they have given over 4,000 more follow links to the Conservative party than Labour – but only 569 more links to Conservative than Lib Dems.
Another interesting figure was the fact that the Daily Mail have only ever given follow links to the Conservative Party’s website. It was also found that The Times links more to the Conservative party – albeit on a much smaller scale (19 times over the 8 times it has linked to Labour and the 8 times to Lib Dems). The Independent was the only outlet to have linked more frequently to the Labour Party’s site – with 77 links compared to 29 to the Conservatives.
Managing Director of Rebootonline.com, and SEO expert Naomi Aharony states:
“Links from online news outlets to political party websites have a powerful effect on the Google rankings for search terms. Ensuring your site ranks near the top of Google search is one of the most valuable weapons political parties have in this election as it means searchers are more exposed to your viewpoint over another competing party.
“This is the first British elections where we can actively see parties aggressively using digital marketing campaigns to hotly contest google rankings.”
