I wonder why some website changes their short and user-friendly URLs to long URLs - examples:
cricinfo.com ----> espncricinfo.com
indiafm.com ---> bollywoodhungama.com
Why would a webmaster choose to make that change?
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The best example of this is o.co which is now Overstock.com– GregCommented Mar 7, 2011 at 10:04
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Mostly for business and branding reasons. ESPN adds ESPN label to crickinfo showing (1) ownership (2) reliability. India FM is not a radio, it sounds more describing with bollywood-hungama.– NishantCommented Mar 7, 2011 at 10:12
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2 Answers
In these instances the reasons are branding and for SEO.
Crininfo in now part of the growing ESPN sporting network, like Soccernet is - ESPN like to see their branding extending throughout their estate. cricinfo.com still works though.
In the second case I think that branding was a secondary consideration behind the need to get better natural search engine rankings for the expression 'Bollywood' - domains that contain a search term get a natural boost in all search engine algorithms (this is demonstrable by testing the theory, the actual algorithms are usually secret).
EDIT
bollywoodhungama.com is #4 in a Google search for 'Bollywood' - a search with hundreds of millions of choices, so the site is clearly optimised for 'Bollywood' which strengthens SEO as the most likely primary reason for the change.
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but for
SEOwe can put keyword intometaand many other ways– xkeshavCommented Mar 7, 2011 at 10:16 -
Yes the meta tags have a bearing, but the domain name, page title, first H1 tag contents and keyword density have a bigger bearing than meta tags in current search algorithms. Google 'seo boost for keyword in domain' for tips on why the domain name is important for SEO.– amelvinCommented Mar 7, 2011 at 10:19
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@John I know that Google stopped using meta tags (except for the description) in 2009, but I'm not certain that every search engine has similarly done so - but I'll bow to your experience.– amelvinCommented Mar 7, 2011 at 18:07
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1@amelvin Bing recently said they didn't use it as well and since Google and Bing power Yahoo and AOL respectively and those four sites make up the overwhelming majority of searches it's safe to say meta tags have no SEO impact anymore.– John Conde ♦Commented Mar 7, 2011 at 19:19
The most obvious reason is search engine optimisation. If your website can be access from more than one URL, then there's a major hole in your SEO.
The alternative URLs will/should 304 redirect to the original domain. The domain that the companies use as their "primary" domain will be down to where the content and assets are stored, such as images and stylesheets, that may be loaded in with relative paths.
