Posted on Monday 26th of February 2007 at 09:39 in Notices

Madness on the Ford website

While browsing for new cars I stumbled across a slightly worrying piece of web design.

Ford, the car giants behind the Focus, Mondeo, GT, Fiesta to name just a few have some weird behaviour on their website.

What I noticed
Whamming "ford.co.uk" into Opera's address bar redirected me to a rather fugly url:
http://www.ford.co.uk/opera/home/-/rt_home/-/-/-/-

Eh? I thought, are they seriously using different folders for different browsers or just employing some bizarre virtual mappings.

Firefox
Using Firefox 2 made the url:
http://www.ford.co.uk/ns7/home/-/rt_home/-/-/-/-

IE7?
http://www.ford.co.uk/ie/home/-/rt_home/-/-/-/-

What the jazz?


I don't know what it's doing but I don't see how that's possibly good practice or acceptable for SEO purposes. Mapping a URL into website.com/browser/home/-/rt/rt_home/-/-/-/- etc isn't good and I don't understand why.

Shame on you Ford for not using clean URL's. Shame on you indeed. Of course if you know the reason why you'd want to do this then please leave me comments - it's the only way I'll learn!

 

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Who is Seopher?

This is me. I'm a 27 year old web
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from near London.

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I'm passionate about the web, heavy metal, zombies and cats.

Seopher
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