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Restore canonical URLs for iPlayer programme pages
You seem to have appended the URLs, which end in the programme's uniqe PID, with a text string of the programme's name - eg http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/.... I'm guessing this is for some possibly misguided SEO reason.
The downside of this is that you're not redirecting from the 'old' URLs (ending in just the PID) to the new form, so there's now 2 versions of the URL which both return the same page - not great. Not only can this confuse search engines (though Google is pretty good at figuring out 'similar pages' now), but also means that sites like delicious, digg, etc can end up with two URLs stored in them, with attention divided between them.
What's worse is that you seem to be ignoring the final string altogether, so that it's possibly to invent URLs with meaningless strings, which still return valid pages, eg http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/...
My advice would be to either go back to the old style URLs, which were shorter anyway, or to use the new-style URLs consistently, and serve permanent redirects from the old URLs to the new ones.
It's a shame that it's come to this, after you spent so much care in the original crafting of the iPlayer and /programmes URLs!
The downside of this is that you're not redirecting from the 'old' URLs (ending in just the PID) to the new form, so there's now 2 versions of the URL which both return the same page - not great. Not only can this confuse search engines (though Google is pretty good at figuring out 'similar pages' now), but also means that sites like delicious, digg, etc can end up with two URLs stored in them, with attention divided between them.
What's worse is that you seem to be ignoring the final string altogether, so that it's possibly to invent URLs with meaningless strings, which still return valid pages, eg http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/...
My advice would be to either go back to the old style URLs, which were shorter anyway, or to use the new-style URLs consistently, and serve permanent redirects from the old URLs to the new ones.
It's a shame that it's come to this, after you spent so much care in the original crafting of the iPlayer and /programmes URLs!
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Inappropriate?Damn, this annoyed me so much I had to blog it: http://www.frankieroberto.com/weblog/898 -
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Inappropriate?Here's what I've just added to my blog post:
As a prime example of why putting titles in URLs is such a bad idea, the URL for the most recent editio of Top Gear is http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00fm0xc/Top_Gear_Series_12_Episode_2_(new_series)/. Yup, someone at the BBC decided it’d be a good idea to add ‘(new series)’ to the programme title in the iPlayer database, presumably because old series get repeated so often that it’s hard for users to tell what’s new or not (hint: it should be possible for the website to work this out from the data programmatically, and then display a ‘NEW’ icon). So now the URL (which is meant to be ‘permanent’ & ’stable’) has ‘new’ in it. Which will be accurate for, oh, about 6 months? -
