Well, this is interesting. A little bird told me to check out the routing on the various Syfy pages based on nationality…the page forhttp://syfy.co.uk, for example. Go ahead, go check out the link. It’s a pretty standard page and looks a lot like the US page (with the exception of having several shows running that we do not, but we’ll go into that at another time). Go down to the bottom of the page and take a look at the right-hand side. Social links, right? Now look at the Facebook link. Hover over it so you can see the link destination in your status bar. It should say:

http://www.facebook.com/SyfyUK

Okay, now that you noted that, go ahead and click it. Where did you end up? Well, if you were logged into Facebook and you are in North America, you are probably at your main feed, with a URL of http://facebook.com/home.php, and if you’re logged out, you should be on the main page, Facebook.com. If you’re not, please let me know in the comments. I would really like to see what is going on here.

Now, there are a few theories as to what is going on here. The most obvious is that Syfy wants their traffic segmented by nationality (or perhaps language), so they redirect attempts to go to other pages. However, this makes little sense, because why would Syfy want to steer its fans to their own feed, or to the Facebook main page?

Another theory is that it is an old redirection, from the days when we could use a lot more HTML on our fan-pages, and that now it’s simply broken due to changes in the Facebook code. I took a look at some of the code from a cached version of the page, but could find nothing particularly special. There are refresh redirects in the page, but they seem to be for the different sections of a given page.