Pretty much every car maker has their “Certified” used car selection, which are mostly lease returns that have gone through (possibly) a few extra inspections than a typical used car before being sold to the new owner. Sometimes they even come with a warranty.

BMW is no exception to this kind of used car marketing.

To promote their no-longer-new cars, BMW ran this half-page ad in 2004. It encourages readers to browse BMW’s online inventory of certified used cars, and then see how fast it is off the line.

Amid all that white text on a light beige background is the site we want to focus on today: bmwusa.com/certified.

For today, we’re looking at the /certified part of the URL. The top-level domain (bmwusa.com) is BMW’s main site for the U.S. market and has been for many years. So we’re not too concerned about that part.

But what happens when you try to look up the /certified site section?

Well, that’s not good. The screengrab above was taken in late June 2020. Instead of a legitimate page, we get the BMW site’s Page Not Found error.

Interestingly, if we simply manually type in bmwusa.com/certified (not presented as a link here as that adds the https and www parts), then we are redirected to simply BMW’s USA homepage. That’s not terrible.

However, they do have a subdomain for their certified used cars (cpo.bmwusa.com/). Why not link bmwusa.com/certified through to there?