Divorce complete, NBC starts modifying news site

Sunday evening saw the end of 16-year joint venture between NBC News and Microsoft — and the two company’s joint website slowly began erasing evidence of the partnership.

The site design has remained mostly unchanged, with a simple a “NBC News” logo replacing the “msnbc.com” logo in the upper left and the copyright lines changed.

In addition, the homepage no longer redirects to an msn.com subdomain, though much of the site’s other content remains at various subdomains under that domain, including many of the branded sites such as NBC Politics and Bottom Line.

It’s not surprising that so much content still lives under msn.com, since transitioning this amount of content to new URLs is no doubt a daunting task that must be done carefully to ensure existing inbound links still work and to minimize the effect on search engine rankings and other factors.

NBC also posted a brief letter from its editor announcing the change (ironically, the letter itself still appears on an msn.com subdomain as of this writing).

Included in the letter is a note that MSNBC television content will be getting its own site in 2013, but remains on the NBCNews.com site for now.

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Many users report still seeing the MSNBC logo on the site Sunday evening, though the new logo is usually visible after refreshing the page. Here again, the site will likely experience small quirks like this over the next few days as content is gradually cleared out of temporary storage and caches across the Web. There are also some inconsistencies with the mobile version of the site.

It will be interesting to see if NBC News tweaks the design of the site or overhauls it completely in the coming days, weeks and months.