Thanks for bringing up this topic.

Slightly off-topic, maybe:

How about “duplicate content” issues if one would enter exactly the same profile content in other professional social networking sites like Xing, and ending up with profile pages (linkedIn, Xing, etc.) having largely identical content? I guess headings will be different but body text will be identical.

Would there be negative effects on the indexing results by the robots?

I don’t think they’ve made the best job of this, but what they seem to be trying to do is actually pretty clever. Here’s what I think they’re aiming for:

1. Split up their users into country buckets. (done, albeit slightly clunky)
2. Build a search-engine-facing link structure for each country. (partway there – see the local ‘browse by country’ they’re showing on the subdomains)
3. Separate off those subdomains & push for them to get into local versions of search engines (only just started)
4. Implement local homepages, automatic local language assumption, etc. (very vageuly started)

WHY WOULD THEY DO ALL OF THIS?

Linkedin is very US centric. The easiest way for them to grow is to expand outside the US, where they’re far less saturated. Their entire search strategy is ‘rank for peoples names’ & they miss an enormous chunk of that by not appearing in ‘pages from the UK’, ‘pages in Germany’, ‘pages in the German language’, etc.

While they haven’t got things quite right so far (eg. try http://hk.linkedin.com/directory/people/d.html ), it’s a good idea & could work very well for them.

Any thoughts?

dan

I cannot think of what the objective must have been for this particular change, so tend to agree with you that there could be a user name or unknown tech issue at play.

Would hope someone from Linkedin will speak out soon as to any intentions with the original www.

Hmmm….

This post was mentioned on Twitter by JoannaButler: LinkedIn’s redesign employs international SEO FAIL: http://j.mp/LinkedInURLs #LinkedIn #SEO #fail – Search Engine Chocolate…