eBay Domain Split
I’ve worked in the industry a long long time, and so when I joined eBay many years ago and they told me they wanted to split the view-item pages in half to prevent fraud, I was pretty sure at that point that I’d have to quit my job or be fired. You see, yelling the Senior VP that the idea is totally full of holes from a technical perspective, when they’ve already committed to the project well before you were hired is pretty much the same as taking a suicide pill. Thankfully, after a few weeks of heavy duty research I was able to come in armed with enough paperwork to choke and elephant that proved that approx 22% of listings would be messed up in some way or another once that project launched. Thankfully they saw it for what it was - a bad idea.
However, I eventually left eBay a few years later and bad ideas prevailed, and yes, they did end up launching the project anyway. Even as my friends who were still there at eBay told me that they were doing it, I was warning them what a bad idea it was. And now they know why it was such a bad idea. Splitting the domains is bad in so many ways, I can hardly count them. It’s bad from a security perspective, because it breaks printing for those people who want to print out their auctions as proof of what they purchased. This is important because auctions change because images are hosted by third parties.
It’s bad from an SEO perspective because the content lives on separate domains (ebaydesc.com). It’s bad from a UI perspective because JavaScript isn’t particularly good about dealing with domains. It’s bad for people who try to suppress portions of content through the use of browser plugins (think Noscript and Request Policy) and on and on… I hate to say this, but I really did tell them so! To all those eBay fans out there who are hating this all I can say is I did my best to fight for you on this one!