Anyone who has ever used Amazon to buy something or accessed any of its other services knows that the company is massive, its site chaotic and you easily end up going through a myriad of choices in your account before you can find the area you want.
In terms of usability and even rationalization it is easy to say that Amazon are not really ‘getting it’ but that’s not true. I happen to see many a corporation from the inside and when it comes to the web unless they are ready to embrace the kind of process which will allow them to truly think in terms of the web, they usually end up wasting more money and energy than is really necessary and still not getting the right amount of exposure required on the web. Because I know the pitfalls and have seen the elephantine speed at which most corporate management address change on the web I can tell you that Amazon is pretty hot.
It runs dozens of different departments and many more dozens of different teams, each charged with its own agenda and still manages, as a company to streamline its SEO in a way that even Microsoft has not quite achieved yet.
Here is an example: Amazon is aware that when it comes to its name search there is plenty of room for misspellings, cyber-squatting of near-miss names (which often are taken up by spam site conglomerates) plus the usual double-think by searchers who simply assume that looking for some kind of review will lead them straight to Amazon. It won’t but it does because Amazon carry out no fewer than 945 domain name redirects (to find out about 301 redirect chains see this video) which take the online visitor straight to Amazon.
Furthermore, within a relatively flat site structure (and achievement in itself given the size of Amazon) the company runs no fewer than 3671 domains which direct to a specific Amazon page (so called ‘deep redirects’). All of this can be seen in detail at the Aboutus.org web page for Amazon
What is truly important here is that when it comes to the web Amazon (who were the first online bookstore in both concept and execution) understand how search engines work and understand what they need to do in terms of guiding those who look for them, directly to the relevant pages, which is why they continue to dominate the web as one of its most successful companies.
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