Barnes & Noble Going Around Asking Everyone To Change All Links From Borders To B&N
from the really? dept
As you probably heard, Borders went out of business recently and Barnes & Noble purchased a bunch of Borders assets around its trademarks. Still, it was a bit surprising when we received an email this week asking us to change any links we have on Techdirt that go to Borders.com to redirect to Barnesandnoble.com:Barnes & Noble recently purchased most of the Borders trademarks and intellectual property in a recent auction. As a result of this purchase, we started transitioning the Borders.com website to Barnesandnoble.com via redirects.To be honest, I absolutely could not recall ever linking to Borders, but I did some digging, and found that we did so... three and a half years ago in a post about Borders.com's last ditch attempt to try to be innovative with a different kind of home page. Because of that we linked to the front page of Borders.com. For a variety of reasons, it would be stupid to change that link. In the context of the story, it wouldn't make any sense at all.
We noticed that your site is currently linking to http://www.borders.com/online/store/Home , and I’d like to reach out and ask you to kindly update your links to the corresponding URLs on Barnesandnoble.com. We have redirects in place for many Borders.com pages, so you can use that to help you determine the correct landing pages on Barnesandnoble.com.
But all of this makes me wonder why Barnes & Noble is wasting their time sending emails to people like this. If it wants to redirect people, just set up some redirects. Don't expect everyone to drop everything and go change ancient links.
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Filed Under: history, links, revising
Companies: barnes & noble, borders
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Re:
Is that so hard to comprehend?
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Re: Re:
Sounds like they're already doing what they're supposed to do and giving those with links to them a head's up. That's called being helpful.
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Re: Re: Re:
That isn't what's happening here. B&N isn't saying "hey just being nice here -- you have broken links," its saying "hey we are going to break those links you have so change them to point to xyz."
It is quite presumptuous to think that you can send out emails and have millions** of links get changed as a result. A far more reasonable solution in my opinion, as many others have pointed out, is to redirect people somewhere useful when they land at a broken borders page.
**number pulled out of my rear
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Tek noligy
Microsoft has been breaking links on it's sites for the past 11 years, for no good reason and no useful redirects. I can't tell you how many times I've followed a blog link to MSDN, only to be deposited on the main page. There is a search on the main page, and I've used it, but I've never found the page that was referenced. Which means the page was deleted, right? Wrong. I had to Google the specific item to find out where Microsoft had moved it.
If Microsoft doesn't understand the internet, can we expect B&N to understand it?
See, Google has spoiled you.
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For sale
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Re: For sale
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Re: For sale
Might it be possible that the rest of humanity has better things to do than to go modify all their web content so that B&N has a way to make money off their Borders IP?
Not to mention that leaving such links in place likely makes borders.com more valuable than it would otherwise be.
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Re: Re: For sale
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Re: Re: Re: For sale
That isn't what's happening here. B&N isn't saying "hey just being nice here -- you have broken links," its saying "hey we are going to break those links you have so change them to point to xyz."
It is quite presumptuous to think that you can send out emails and have millions** of links get changed as a result. A far more reasonable solution in my opinion, as many others have pointed out, is to redirect people somewhere useful when they land at a broken borders page.
**number pulled out of my rear
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Re: Re: Re: Re: For sale
Then again, were I them, I wouldn't have bothered sending out the email. I would have done it the old fashioned way: screw them, they can update their links when their users complain. I'm a bit of an asshole.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: For sale
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I don't see the problem.
No panty twisting needed.
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SEO
If they can get the millions of links to borders to now link directly to B&N they get a ton more SEO juice. Granted they are already at the top of most book search results...
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Re: SEO
Or, a quick redirect page, along the lines of:
"Sorry, Borders went out of business!
However, Barnes and Noble is still doing great, so we'll redirect you there in *countdown* seconds!"
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Cheap cheap
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Re: Cheap cheap
Much like the entertainment industry they do not want to do any real work.
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Clueless
USA, LTD. a wholly owned subsidiary of MegaGinormiCorp™©
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Time is Money
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Re: Time is Money
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TBH, I think this wasn't a bad thing...
Consolidating urls, trying to optimize SEO(search engine optimization) to lead to B&N.
But I'm biased having worked for their company, and them having somewhat reasonable SOP compared to other places.
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Re: TBH, I think this wasn't a bad thing...
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Slow news day, Maz?
What kind of a hack journalist are you? And why do you have a "Too Much Free Time" article category? Maybe you should update that category type to "Things That Make Me Angry" and have a guest poster named Ed Anger post them on your behalf.
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Re: Slow news day, Maz?
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Re: Slow news day, Maz?
It's worth pointing out the idiocy that often goes on behind the scenes in corporations. B&N could have done 10 minutes work to redirect URLs, and even used the redirect as a marketing opportunity. Instead, they send out bulk emails telling other people to do that work for them. Creating the mailing list alone would have taken more time than performing the redirect.
This is the kind of thing we need to remember when these same companies are the ones trying to demand "protection" for their business models. They have many more problems than "pirates".
"What kind of a hack journalist are you?"
A blogger on a personal opinion blog?
"And why do you have a "Too Much Free Time" article category?"
To accurately label people who post on opinion blogs demanding investigative journalism and complaining about the stories being written?
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I redirect all the time, in the background, and nobody need ever be "reached out" to.
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They DO redirect!
This is an instance of intelligence from a corporation. Why are we deriding them over it?
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In case someone else hasn't said it already; this is silly. It's got to be more cost-effective for them to just retain the domain name and direct it to their own pages with some kind of 'we purchased borders message, is this (potentially relevant search result) what you were looking for?'
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