7 ms·

The Guardian Moves to .com Domain

75 points by drewvolpe 13y ago

makomk 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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 13y ago
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 13y ago
  .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 13y ago
    > 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/current-policy-discussions-and-consultations/registration-second http://www.nominet.org.uk/how-participate/policy-development...
    - toble 13y ago
      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.
      - nly 13y ago
        > The idea to use the top level was rejected, thankfully. It's still on their homepage (pink "Consultation" box) and the wording is "revised proposals". Worryingly they're also looking at introducing residency checks for individual registrations.
      - icebraining 13y ago
        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.
      - da_n 13y ago
        As icebraining says, there is no reason for the 2 to be mutually exclusive.
    - da_n 13y ago
      I would mind less if there was more universal consistency, for example in France you have lemonde.fr, in Germany you have spiegel.de, in the UK you have independent.co.uk, Japan is japantimes.co.jp.
    - tehwalrus 13y ago
      when MPs staff tell people their email address, they almost always have to say it two or three times before people believe them - the domain is simply parliament.uk (similarly, nhs.uk ).
- javert 13y ago
  Yeah, beacause what we need is for government bureaucrats to make more rules, particularly regarding anything relating to the Internet. I'll phone my representative, maybe he can sneak this in as a rider to a 2,000 page bill about abortion or gay marriage or funding the terrorists in Syria that nobody read.
- tttp 13y ago
  Wwhat makes you say the guardian is UK-specific? they had two domain names that they seem to put together under a single one. That seems to be a logical move. http://www.theguardian.com/gnm-press-office/guardian-us-grows-80-percent http://www.theguardian.com/gnm-press-office/guardian-us-grow... The latest big news was about Snowden, hardly qualifies as a uk news ;)
- criley2 13y ago
  Quite the opposite. I wish non-US companies were disallowed from using .com. All American businesses use .com. Some non-American businesses do too, but it's first and foremost the "business" TLD for American businesses, just as .gov is used by the American government, and .org is loosely used for many types of American organizations. In hindsight, doing .us.co or .us.com would have made a lot of sense. But hindsight is 20/20, and that's simply not what happened.
  - chebucto 13y ago
    The UK has a similar privilege with postage stamps. They were the first to use stamps, and because of that they don't need to put the name of their country on their stamps: "... on May 6, the Penny Black became the world's first postage stamp in use. The stamp was originally for use only within the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and as such was in effect initially a local stamp. For this reason the name of the country was not included within the design, a situation which continued by agreement with foreign post offices, provided the sovereign's effigy appeared on the stamp. Envelopes sold with postage paid did not include this, so were marked with the country's name. In 1951, the special commemorative issue for the Festival of Britain included the name "Britain" incidentally. It could therefore be said that the name of the country then appeared for the first time on a stamp of the UK, although the word "British" had appeared on British Empire Exhibition commemorative stamps of 1924." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postage_stamps_and_postal_history_of_Great_Britain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postage_stamps_and_postal_hist...
- bowlofpetunias 13y ago
  I've always found this very much to be a US a problem. Most shops from Oslo to Hong Kong will gladly ship to anywhere on the planet, at most you have to inquire about the shipping costs. I have no idea why Americans are so phobic about shipping abroad. It can't be a service issue, on that front one would expect exactly the opposite.
  - Avalaxy 13y ago
    Not sure, but it may be a legal issue. Some things that are legal in the US aren't in Europe. Some product contain materials that aren't legal in Europe.
shirro 13y ago
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.
nly 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    It doesn't matter. The old domain issues a HTTP redirect, so it's effectively dead from a marketing perspective.
    - erichurkman 13y ago
      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 13y ago
        What I meant by "marketing" was the .uk domain is no longer visible to visitors. I don't care about SEO.
- tsmarsh 13y ago
  gu.com works beautifully.
jpswade 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    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.)
    - johneth 13y ago
      Actually, a lot fewer newspapers are sold in the UK than that, according to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_the_United_Kingdom_by_circulation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_the_Unite... It says the Daily Mail has a circulation of about 1.8m daily, the Guardian has a circulation of about 200k daily. The Sun is the most widely bought newspaper, at 2.4m daily, but they're all declining across the board.
    - antoko 13y ago
      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_United_Kingdom_by_circulation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_the_Unite...
vickytnz 13y ago
Amused to see how US commenters take to the famously opinionated yet erudite CIFers :D
- eterm 13y ago
  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.
- nailer 13y ago
  Comment Is Free, for anyone wondering...
basicallydan 13y ago
Oh, great. Now I have to type "theguardian.com" a load of times to replace the top result in Chrome for "th"
- midgetjones 13y ago
  They still have http://gu.com http://gu.com set up to redirect :)
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
adaml_623 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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.
- nly 13y ago
  Probably GeoIP. Visiting bbc.co.uk from abroad always weirds me out because of the ads, restricted content and international centricity.
- nailer 13y ago
  NYTimes does the International Herald Tribune, the 'global edition of the New York Times'. Guardian has had Guardian Weekly which is similarly international for around a decade too. Both are major-issues-only papers with a very slight US/UK slant.
rythie 13y ago
HTTPS is still broken though - it would nice if that was fixed so it really could be read by the whole world uncensored.
epoxyhockey 13y ago
Perhaps this is an SEO play, as well?
mherdeg 13y ago
Happy to see that they've kept redirects in place, in particular the all-important http://grauniad.co.uk http://grauniad.co.uk .
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- jpswade 13y ago
  >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]
benhalllondon 13y ago
Can anyone think of anyway to keep cookies as they move across domains?
cantlin 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    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.

75 points by drewvolpe 13y ago

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 13y ago
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 13y ago

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 13y ago
.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 13y ago
  > 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/current-policy-discussions-and-consultations/registration-second http://www.nominet.org.uk/how-participate/policy-development...
  - toble 13y ago
    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.
    - nly 13y ago
      > The idea to use the top level was rejected, thankfully. It's still on their homepage (pink "Consultation" box) and the wording is "revised proposals". Worryingly they're also looking at introducing residency checks for individual registrations.
    - icebraining 13y ago
      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.
    - da_n 13y ago
      As icebraining says, there is no reason for the 2 to be mutually exclusive.
  - da_n 13y ago
    I would mind less if there was more universal consistency, for example in France you have lemonde.fr, in Germany you have spiegel.de, in the UK you have independent.co.uk, Japan is japantimes.co.jp.
  - tehwalrus 13y ago
    when MPs staff tell people their email address, they almost always have to say it two or three times before people believe them - the domain is simply parliament.uk (similarly, nhs.uk ).
javert 13y ago
Yeah, beacause what we need is for government bureaucrats to make more rules, particularly regarding anything relating to the Internet. I'll phone my representative, maybe he can sneak this in as a rider to a 2,000 page bill about abortion or gay marriage or funding the terrorists in Syria that nobody read.
tttp 13y ago
Wwhat makes you say the guardian is UK-specific? they had two domain names that they seem to put together under a single one. That seems to be a logical move. http://www.theguardian.com/gnm-press-office/guardian-us-grows-80-percent http://www.theguardian.com/gnm-press-office/guardian-us-grow... The latest big news was about Snowden, hardly qualifies as a uk news ;)
criley2 13y ago
Quite the opposite. I wish non-US companies were disallowed from using .com. All American businesses use .com. Some non-American businesses do too, but it's first and foremost the "business" TLD for American businesses, just as .gov is used by the American government, and .org is loosely used for many types of American organizations. In hindsight, doing .us.co or .us.com would have made a lot of sense. But hindsight is 20/20, and that's simply not what happened.
- chebucto 13y ago
  The UK has a similar privilege with postage stamps. They were the first to use stamps, and because of that they don't need to put the name of their country on their stamps: "... on May 6, the Penny Black became the world's first postage stamp in use. The stamp was originally for use only within the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and as such was in effect initially a local stamp. For this reason the name of the country was not included within the design, a situation which continued by agreement with foreign post offices, provided the sovereign's effigy appeared on the stamp. Envelopes sold with postage paid did not include this, so were marked with the country's name. In 1951, the special commemorative issue for the Festival of Britain included the name "Britain" incidentally. It could therefore be said that the name of the country then appeared for the first time on a stamp of the UK, although the word "British" had appeared on British Empire Exhibition commemorative stamps of 1924." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postage_stamps_and_postal_history_of_Great_Britain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postage_stamps_and_postal_hist...
bowlofpetunias 13y ago
I've always found this very much to be a US a problem. Most shops from Oslo to Hong Kong will gladly ship to anywhere on the planet, at most you have to inquire about the shipping costs. I have no idea why Americans are so phobic about shipping abroad. It can't be a service issue, on that front one would expect exactly the opposite.
- Avalaxy 13y ago
  Not sure, but it may be a legal issue. Some things that are legal in the US aren't in Europe. Some product contain materials that aren't legal in Europe.

shirro 13y ago

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.

nly 13y ago

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 13y ago
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 13y ago
  It doesn't matter. The old domain issues a HTTP redirect, so it's effectively dead from a marketing perspective.
  - erichurkman 13y ago
    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 13y ago
      What I meant by "marketing" was the .uk domain is no longer visible to visitors. I don't care about SEO.
tsmarsh 13y ago
gu.com works beautifully.

jpswade 13y ago

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 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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.)
  - johneth 13y ago
    Actually, a lot fewer newspapers are sold in the UK than that, according to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_the_United_Kingdom_by_circulation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_the_Unite... It says the Daily Mail has a circulation of about 1.8m daily, the Guardian has a circulation of about 200k daily. The Sun is the most widely bought newspaper, at 2.4m daily, but they're all declining across the board.
  - antoko 13y ago
    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_United_Kingdom_by_circulation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_the_Unite...

vickytnz 13y ago

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

eterm 13y ago
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.
nailer 13y ago
Comment Is Free, for anyone wondering...

basicallydan 13y ago

Oh, great. Now I have to type "theguardian.com" a load of times to replace the top result in Chrome for "th"

midgetjones 13y ago
They still have http://gu.com http://gu.com set up to redirect :)
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]

adaml_623 13y ago

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 13y ago
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.
nly 13y ago
Probably GeoIP. Visiting bbc.co.uk from abroad always weirds me out because of the ads, restricted content and international centricity.
nailer 13y ago
NYTimes does the International Herald Tribune, the 'global edition of the New York Times'. Guardian has had Guardian Weekly which is similarly international for around a decade too. Both are major-issues-only papers with a very slight US/UK slant.

rythie 13y ago

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

epoxyhockey 13y ago

Perhaps this is an SEO play, as well?

mherdeg 13y ago

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

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
jpswade 13y ago
>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]

benhalllondon 13y ago

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

cantlin 13y ago

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 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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.