
Ask HN: Why is the ESPN website still a subdomain of go.com? - jeffclark
ESPN is a huge site. According to Alexa, it's #17 in the U.S. and #68 worldwide. It's a HUGE site, obviously.<p>So, why does espn.com redirect to espn.go.com?<p>My first thought would be SEO/SEM. But there are countless ways to keep SEO/SEM when you change domains, and presumably Disney has the resources and manpower to make something like this happen.<p>They promote it as espn.com, so why, after 15+ years, do they still redirect to a subdomain?
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car
I believe this is done to share a cookie across Disney owned companies (ESPN,
ABC, Disney) web properties. These are <http://abc.go.com>,
<http://espn.go.com> and <http://disney.go.com>. There are more if you look at
the footer of <http://go.com>.

This is also practiced by Yahoo for their country domains (i.e.
<http://www.yahoo.de> turns into <http://de.yahoo.com>).

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rhizome
Given the companies involved, they're likely hedging their bets. I'd put it
that it's _only_ been 15 years to them.

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mikeknoop
Wow, I've never noticed this until just now. The base domain go.com doesn't
look respectable or trustworthy at all, either.

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dsspence
You could expand the question to say why do abc, disney, and espn all include
go.com in their url? Obviously they all share the same ownership. Although I
think there would be better ways to promote cross brand pollination.

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byoung2
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go.com>

There's an interesting history there. I'm not sure why they haven't changed to
just use their own domains, given how much of a failure the go.com portal
concept was.

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WillyF
Their information architecture is a little odd too. Back when I was looking at
their jobs a year or two ago, they had a Jobs page from 2002 still up on their
site with an old school design. I just checked back, and it finally redirects
to their Careers page, which is on a separate domain. It seems to me that
they've kind of cobbled things together as they've moved forward.

There may be some SEO value from keeping all of the sites on the go.com
domain, but that doesn't really seem to explain it. My best guess is that if
they changed it, it would break something.

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niico
Many search engines and Alexa don't discrimiate subdomains, therefore Go.com
will have a super high rank and/or link weight.

Yahoo does the same and so many big companies.

I will say SEO purposes but also their whole infrastructure its quite
obsolete.

This whole domain, sub domain or sub folder has a looong almost-philosophical
debate.

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jp
This is old school portal logic. money.cnn.com animal.discovery.com

Go.com email shut down earlier this year, btw - <http://go.com/mail/help>

