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Ask HN: Why is the ESPN website still a subdomain of go.com?

14 points by jeffclark ↗ HN
ESPN is a huge site. According to Alexa, it's #17 in the U.S. and #68 worldwide. It's a HUGE site, obviously.

So, why does espn.com redirect to espn.go.com?

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.

They promote it as espn.com, so why, after 15+ years, do they still redirect to a subdomain?

8 comments

[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 32.3 ms ] thread
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.
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.

mikeknoop
Wow, I've never noticed this until just now. The base domain go.com doesn't look respectable or trustworthy at all, either.
rhizome
Given the companies involved, they're likely hedging their bets. I'd put it that it's only been 15 years to them.
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.

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

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.