Madness on the Ford website
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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Showing most recent 4 of 4 comments
most likely due to foolish notions of upper management, not developers.
and now, trying to accomplish simple detection is impossible due to the number of stupid complications.
IT Consultant in NYC.
P.S. - I love my 2000 Taurus with its metallic flexible fuel engine and tank-like durability
too bad Ford is so behind the times, and now trying to catch up, and that they have lost soo much market share, and what they did to Flint, Michigan
Detecting the browser ("User-Agent") can be done server-side before sending output to the browser, so this is actually redundant! Which makes this crazy!!
They’re simply mapping ’folders’ virtually - like you suggested. Such as mapping
domain.com/abc/123/def/678
to
domain.com/?page=abc&variable=123&somethingelse=def¬hing=678
But if you do a mapping like:
domain.com/PAGE/VARIABLE/SOMETHINGELSE/NOTHING
And you don’t need "SOMETHINGELSE" then you get
domain.com/PAGE/VARIABLE/NOTHING
which maps incorrectly (maps somethingelse to what nothing should be, still following?!?! I’m not!).
So, they use /-/-/-/-/- using ’-’ to say "no value". As for the browser, it’s just being mapped to
domain.com/index.php?browser=BROWSER
It could be seen as cloaking - but as it’ll (surely?!) be legitimate, it’s not. It’s just a hack to display different minute variations depending on browser, but like Heliologue said, a client-side JavaScript would have sufficed.