[maldeh]

That's fair, but is it really so much work to enter three extra keys on a url? That doesn't strike me as a convincing enough reason not to attempt a brand change, if it otherwise makes sense. (Unless there are many frustrated mobile users somewhere who've decided they've put up with long urls far enough!)

Using an article such as "the" in a brand typically indicates a desire to lay stake on a common noun as a proper noun, or at least the definitive instance of the noun. It often doesn't make sense when your brand is obviously a proper noun or otherwise unique already, but I suppose there's plenty enough newspapers having a variant of "Guardian" in their titles to warrant a push to definitive-hood.

Edit: A friend also pointed out that "guardian.com" is already taken by another established organization. I think that trumps my silly grammatical analysis :P

[walshemj]

Well shouldn't it have been the-manchester-guardian.com :-)

Will be interesting to have a look and see how well or not the in house seo/dev team have done the migration

[dc2447]

URLS were and I assume still are a massive part of the collective thought process in the Guardian but yeah, if you are GU then the internet will take whatever you say as canonical to be canonical regardless of seo strategy

[walshemj]

didn't work when a major uk job site (no names no pack drill) stuffed up its canonicals on all its job category pages cost them 1/2 a mill in less than a week.