The other evening Camillo Di Tullio, a.k.a. Dr Who, asked me via IM if I was having problems accessing highly trafficked social media websites like Facebook or LinkedIn. In that particular moment, I wasn’t, but his question stuck a particular cord. We’ve seen many downtime issues with major Internet sites lately.

Website downtime, planned and unplanned, presents a company with a reluctant marketing opportunity. After all, investments in search engine visibility and other website traffic drivers are all for naught when a site is no longer reachable. The best a company can do is acknowledge the issue and, where appropriate, attempt a dose of humor while working frantically behind the scenes to insure the problem doesn’t occur again.

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A common issue facing companies and organizations with an international presence is how to deploy multilingual sites across one or more Internet domain(s). In other words, should one put all the sites on a .com or .org domain, perhaps taking advantage of directories on the web server to separate each language? Is this the best solution for existing and potential customers? Will there be problems with search engine indexing and visibility?

After having tackled the issue in various SEO projects, I decided to share some of the issues that should be considered when choosing the right path for your company or organization.

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Marketing professionals know that brands are worth big money. A brand name and logo serve as an instant shorthand to convey a mental image of a product or service. Companies invest extensively when developing and launching a new brand name. Once launched, brand names are fiercely protected.

Looking for Trenitalia?

It was thus with surprise that I noticed several weeks ago traffic to Trenitalia being redirected to the parent group’s website which carries the old retail name, Ferrovie dello Stato.

Looking for this?

This is what you’ll get.

Stranger yet, timetable queries made from the Ferrovie dello Stato home page produced results using the orario.trenitalia.com subdomain with the Trenitalia name and graphics. Upon closer inspection, I noticed the redirect was accomplished with a simple client side meta refresh tag – rather than the preferred server side method to set a permanent 301 or temporary 302 http redirect status.

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