Tuesday, July 13, 2004

DiscoveryChannel.com Needs Serious Help

So I'm going to The Discovery Channel Website to get the show times for the Wired NextFest tv show and I'm met with utter disbelief. I typed in www.discoverychannel.com only to be redirected to http://www.discovery.com/?channel=DSC, this is really bad from a search engine spider's perspective. It's bad because they're using a 302 "Temporary" redirect instead of a 301 Permanent redirect. A 301 basically tells the spider that the url has moved permanently to another url. Plus, all of the link popularity www.discoverychannel.com has, which is a lot, doesn't transfer to the new url. Here's what www.discovery.com is missing out on in the way of backlinks. I know a lot of professionl search engine marketers that would love to get their hands on this number of backlinks :0)

Engine Backlinks
-------------------------
AllTheWeb 1,270
AltaVista 1,300
Google/AOL 9,440
MSN 737
Yahoo 1,600
HotBot 762

Side note: I used the Global Promoter link popularity tool to get the above numbers in one fell swoop.

I'll put up another post regarding the Wired NextFest story but I couldn't resist digging into the redirect issue www.discoverychannel.com is currently suffering from.
What a shame!

Posted By Jason Dowdell at 09:14 AM
Permanent Link: DiscoveryChannel.com Needs Serious Help | Comments (0)

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