
The Guardian Moves to .com Domain - drewvolpe
http://www.theguardian.com/help/insideguardian/2013/jul/30/the-guardian-dot-com
======
shirro
When I was a kid my town had two newspapers. A broadsheet and a shitty rag
called The News. The guy who inherited The News went on to buy the other paper
and then like a cancer take over the world. Today 11 of the 12 Australian
capital city dailies are owned by just two companies.

There are a few independent online news services but having the Guardian start
an Australian branch is a welcome boost to democracy here. Visiting the
Australian sub-site on a co.uk domain wasn't all that attractive for a country
that has been independent since federation. So well done everyone at The
Guardian.

------
mherdeg
Happy to see that they've kept redirects in place, in particular the all-
important [http://grauniad.co.uk](http://grauniad.co.uk) .

~~~
jpswade
>wget [http://grauniad.co.uk/](http://grauniad.co.uk/) \--2013-07-31
09:10:13-- [http://grauniad.co.uk/](http://grauniad.co.uk/) Resolving
grauniad.co.uk... 77.91.252.10, 77.91.251.10 Connecting to
grauniad.co.uk|77.91.252.10|:80... connected. HTTP request sent, awaiting
response... 301 Moved Permanently Location:
[http://www.guardian.co.uk/](http://www.guardian.co.uk/) [following]
\--2013-07-31 09:10:13--
[http://www.guardian.co.uk/](http://www.guardian.co.uk/) Resolving
www.guardian.co.uk... 185.31.16.185, 103.245.223.205 Connecting to
www.guardian.co.uk|185.31.16.185|:80... connected. HTTP request sent, awaiting
response... 301 www.guardian.co.uk gets redirected Location:
[http://www.theguardian.com/](http://www.theguardian.com/) [following]
\--2013-07-31 09:10:13--
[http://www.theguardian.com/](http://www.theguardian.com/) Resolving
www.theguardian.com... 185.31.16.185, 103.245.223.205 Connecting to
www.theguardian.com|185.31.16.185|:80... connected. HTTP request sent,
awaiting response... 302 Found Location:
[http://www.theguardian.com/uk](http://www.theguardian.com/uk) [following]
\--2013-07-31 09:10:14--
[http://www.theguardian.com/uk](http://www.theguardian.com/uk) Reusing
existing connection to www.theguardian.com:80. HTTP request sent, awaiting
response... 200 OK Length: 348737 (341K) [text/html]

------
nly
I rather preferred the aesthetic of "guardian.co.uk" to "theguardian.com". The
"theguardian" logo is rather fugly.

It also seems a bit premature, why not wait for guardian.news?

~~~
Shank
I think they'll probably end up keeping guardian.co.uk just to prevent a
squatter from taking it - this post sounds more like an explanation to readers
as to why they're now redirecting to the new location and silently changing
URLs to the new place.

At least, I don't think that The Guardian is going to ditch it any time soon -
too much SEO & incoming links to the old tld to lose if they do.

~~~
nly
It doesn't matter. The old domain issues a HTTP redirect, so it's effectively
dead from a marketing perspective.

~~~
erichurkman
Not dead. All links issue 301 Moved Permanently redirects.

    
    
      curl -I http://www.theguardian.co.uk/politics/2013/jul/30/clegg-go-home-illegal-immigrants-campaign
      HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
      <snip>
      Location: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/jul/30/clegg-go-home-illegal-immigrants-campaign
    

Also, all of their pages have proper canonical tags.

    
    
      <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/jul/30/clegg-go-home-illegal-immigrants-campaign" />

~~~
nly
What I meant by "marketing" was the .uk domain is no longer visible to
visitors. I don't care about SEO.

------
makomk
The Guardian's been making a fairly obvious play for the US online market for
several years now, particularly in their choice of opinion writers and topics.

~~~
untog
_The Guardian 's been making a fairly obvious play for the US online market
for several years now_

'Obvious' in the sense that they publicly announced they were going to do it,
did it, and talked about having done it.. yes.

------
lmm
I wish US-specific (or any country-specific) sites weren't allowed to use
.com. There's a perfectly good .us TLD going almost unused, and as an
international user it's very frustrating to find a shop I want to buy from on
a .com, and then discover that it only sells to the US.

~~~
da_n
.us is great, I too am surprised at how little I see it in use. Aside form the
more restrictive application process, I think it partly stems from the fact
.us came after .com and also initially a lot of users had confusion about TLDs
(the type of people who would recite addresses like "h-t-t-p-colon-forward-
slash-forward-slash-w-w-w-dot-example-dot-com" instead of just "example dot
com"). Rightly or wrongly a lot of companies played it safe and went for .com.

On a related note, I have always disliked the fact that UK TLD disallows use
of .uk, instead lumped with the crappy .co.uk.

~~~
nly
> I have always disliked the fact that UK TLD disallows use of .uk,

Nominet have already floated the idea of opening up .UK for top level
registration [1]. It wouldn't surprise me at all if they try and milk the
market for topical 2LDs either.

I actually think it's a bad idea. Keeping a ccTLDs level reserved seems
sensible to me. For instance, only UK Limited companies are allowed to
register .ltd.uk domains.

[1] [http://www.nominet.org.uk/how-participate/policy-
development...](http://www.nominet.org.uk/how-participate/policy-
development/current-policy-discussions-and-consultations/registration-second)

~~~
toble
The idea to use the top level was rejected, thankfully. I like the way the
domains are categorised, so you can tell when something is a school,
government, etc. It gives domains a certain level of assurance and authority.

~~~
icebraining
One think doesn't prevent the other; our governmental sites are still .gov.pt,
even though .pt is open for registration.

It's just a matter of reserving those domains.

------
cantlin
I'm one of the product guys at The Guardian involved in this project. It was
quite an undertaking. Happy to field any questions you might have as best I
can.

~~~
drewvolpe
I'd be really interested in what things you did make sure your existing pages
didn't lose pagerank and what affects it seems to be having.

~~~
cantlin
The blanket wildcard 301 redirect between .co.uk and .com was one of the
quicker things to implement, since our path structure hasn't changed. These
should cause pagerank to migrate fairly seamlessly. It's also no accident that
the move was scheduled for late July, one of the slowest months for us in
traffic terms, reducing risk. We saw Google referrer traffic take a nose dive
yesterday, but appears to be recovering nicely today and is expected to return
to pre-move levels over August.

------
jpswade
This seems like a power move to gain international traction, but it
immediately discounts it as a good source for national news, as it
traditionally has been.

~~~
dotBen
The Guardian as a UK-orientated news entity is/was on the death march. When
they re-tooled their printing press a few years ago they said quite openly it
would be the last printing press they would ever buy.

Guardian has been making a loss for years [1] in the difficult UK market, it's
future is as an international orientated news source. I want them to stick
around so I welcome the expansion.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Guardian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Guardian)
(search "loss")

~~~
tehwalrus
In terms of papers sold, the Graun shifts about 400,000 a day - in contrast,
the Daily Mail sells 8,000,000 papers. (the numbers may be a couple of years
out of date.)

(aside: the majority of voters for _all three_ of the big parties in the UK
read the Daily Mail, of them that read a print newspaper.)

~~~
antoko
The Sun has consistently been the biggest daily in the UK for a long time, and
I would suggest at least some of the parties have a majority buying that
paper, historically the Mirror which comes in 3rd would be considered a more
leftist paper (as was the guardian itself) and so would be much more likely to
be a favorite amongst Labour voters.

The Mail hasn't had daily sales over 4 million this millennium. But since you
apparently overestimate the guardians sales by 100% too I guess the point
you're making still stands.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_the_Unite...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_the_United_Kingdom_by_circulation)

~~~
tehwalrus
apologies - I was given these numbers while training as a political party's
election agent - I didn't know they were _that_ stale!

~~~
antoko
Thinking about it, they may be talking about readership rather than sales.
People can pass around a paper in the break room or family members may read
the same paper. I'm not sure how well they can estimate those numbers though.

Sales figures obviously give a much more concrete number for comparing paper
to paper, but if you're trying to make a comparison to TV viewers or some
other type of media maybe the readership numbers are more meaningful.

------
basicallydan
Oh, great. Now I have to type " _theguardian.com_ " a load of times to replace
the top result in Chrome for " _th_ "

~~~
midgetjones
They still have [http://gu.com](http://gu.com) set up to redirect :)

------
vickytnz
Amused to see how US commenters take to the famously opinionated yet erudite
CIFers :D

~~~
eterm
They've had "CIF America" for quite a while, and the most flamey stuff tended
to be cross posted to the main CIF so they probably are prepared for the
typical BTL backlash.

------
adaml_623
I'll be interested to see how they handle Sports and other national issues
that are totally uninteresting to people from other countries BUT are very
interesting to people from the UK (or where ever) that are accessing the site
from outside the UK.

Generally I've not seen this handled gracefully

~~~
dotBen
Or just UK orientated news for ex-pats like myself.

When I worked at BBC News we split the site into "UKFS" (uk facing site) and
"IFS" (international facing site) but let readers pick via cookie which they
wanted.

Since I left they changed it to always set to your region, which is always
frustrating.

------
benhalllondon
Can anyone think of anyway to keep cookies as they move across domains?

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rythie
HTTPS is still broken though - it would nice if that was fixed so it really
could be read by the whole world uncensored.

------
epoxyhockey
Perhaps this is an SEO play, as well?

