Marketing URL

[Houses]

Hi,

I need a bit of advice on marketing URL's.

The destinations URL is http://www.website.com/by-development.php?area=Isle Of Wight&development=developmentname.

If we wanted to use www.website.com/developmentname on literature to send people to the ugly URL above, what would we do?

Would we need to rewrite the ugly URL to the neat and then 301 the ugly to the neat?

Currently, the team are using a new domain of neatandrelevant.info and 301 redirecting it to ugly URL but there are lots of different developments they want to send people to so a new domain is bought for each development which seems a bit unnecessary. They point to different pages on the ugly URL website.

Assuming canonical tag would not be needed then because the ugly URL page would be redirected.

Also, as the website has ugly URL's anyway, would it not be best practice to use rewrites anyway so that the URL's read www.mywebsite.com/region/development?

Would it confuse things to then have extra short marketing URL's missing out /region?

Hope that makes sense....

[Dr-Pete]

I don't understand the point of the external domain, either - I tend to agree with you that sub-folders would be perfectly fine here. Unfortunately, there are two issues at play:

(1) You've got to direct the short, marketing URLs to the main site URLs. That's a relatively easy - you could either use rewrites or redirects (rewrites are probably better for humans, in this case). Google can't generally index URLs that are on printed materials, TV ads, billboards, etc. (unless people start linking to them or promoting them on social), so your SEO risks are pretty minimal. The safest bet would be a straight 301-redirect.

(2) The other issue is the long/ugly URLs on the site in general. If you want to move the entire site to the short URLs and then use those short URLs for marketing, that's great, but then you'll need to 301-redirect the entire current site. There are definitely risks to that approach, and I'm not sure it's necessary here. The benefits really depend on the scope of the current site and whether the URL structure is creating problems, like spinning out duplicate pages. You could also potentially use rel=canonical to solve some problems, but again, changing your site-wide URLs involves risk.

I wrote more on (2) here:

http://moz.com/blog/should-i-change-my-urls-for-seo

[Dr-Pete]

Just wanted to clarify - [www.getmove-in.com/sub] is a folder or sub-folder. A sub-domain would be [sub.getmove-in.com]. We rarely recommend sub-domains for SEO these days.

[Houses]

Had a nudge from Moz to look at the question again to try and get the answer I need - thanks to those that have helped so far though.

The site our (other and independent) marketing team are trying to send people to is http://www.getmove-in.com/ - specifically the pages about individual developments such as http://www.getmove-in.com/by-development.php?area=Isle%20Of%20Wight&development=Pan%20Meadows. The problem is it's an ugly URL and not good to put on the bottom of printed leaflets.

What they are after is a snappier URL. They have currently 'solved' it by buying a new domain www.panmeadows.info to publish on leaflets. This domain redirects to the internal page http://www.getmove-in.com/by-development.php?area=Isle%20Of%20Wight&development=Pan%20Meadows. It seems an odd way of doing thing and means that they have to buy a new domain each time they want to publicise a new development.

What would be ideal is if they could use www.getmove-in.com/panmeadows as a URL. I suspect that even if they could get a neater URL structure to the site, the URL would be in a longer format such as www.getmove-in.com/development/isleofwight/panmeadows or www.getmove-in.com/isleofwight/panmeadows which is longer-than-ideal for a leaflet.

First question: Should all the pages on the site be re-written to neater URL's? (and I'm guessing in the absence of being able to do a redesign and 301 the pages as Wesley suggested this would be the case).

Second question: If we can do this, would we need to 301 the old ugly URL pages to the new? (guessing you do)

Third question: If we can do that and we get neater URL's, how do we get even shorter ones for the purposes of writing on leaflets (marketing URL's) e.g. www.getmove-in.com/panmeadows. What would be the technical bit behind someone seeing www.getmove-in.com/panmeadows on a leaflet and ending up on the content on the page http://www.getmove-in.com/by-development.php?area=Isle%20Of%20Wight&development=Pan%20Meadows.

Sorry if it's written confusingly

[Houses]

Thanks again Nathan.

Still struggling to understand why they are doing what they are doing. It may well be custom CMS - it was created by an external design agency who may well have suggested the additional domain 'strategy'.

Am hoping to have a chat with the team that set all this up to see what we can do because the URL's are ugly and the domain buying seems a bit strange to me.

[NateStewart]

No problem,

Thanks for sharing the URL, that really help clear things up.

After doing some digging around this is what I've come up with. Keep in mind that this is my opinion and not a guaranteed answer.

• Your URL is www.getmovin-in.com, this is the root domain.
• Ever page created on your site should be a sub-domain. e.g. www.getmove-in.com/sub-domain page.
• There should be no need to purchase these pages, they are just created and labeled neatly
• I have no idea what CMS they are using, it is not wordpress (which is what I work with). According to the developers site it is a hand built CMS. Not sure why they would do this when there are others already built and really easy to use.
• You basically have a non-profit/real-estate site. Here is a good example of that kind of site here in the states, http://www.hudhomestore.com

Unfortunately I have little experience in dealing with this type of site, but I can tell you, if you site returns a search result like region, city, price, etc, then you will have those ugly URLs. I want to say there is a way to deal with it but I'm not sure. You might try browsing through the blogs at distilled.net, or even contacting them since they are based in the UK I believe. (I am not good with European geography, forgive my ignorance! )

Again I hope this helps, even if only a little.

[Houses]

Thanks Nathan,

I don't understand the logic either. The site was designed before I arrived and the relevant department has only just told me how they are marketing individual developments.

The site is http://www.getmove-in.com/. It is a CMS but I don't know what as I don't deal with this website. Also don't know hosting details.

The sort of site they have bought to 301 is panmeadows.info.

[NateStewart]

if you are using a CMS like wordpress, then you should be able to just simply rewrite the url after the ".com/" to what ever you want. I don't understand why you would need to buy a new url and 301 anything, even if your not using a CMS.

I am guessing based off what you wrote, that you have a "Main site page" with navigation somewhere on the top or side. If this is correct then i would say you need to stop buying new domains and simply create a "developments" tab in the navigation with a drop down listing the different pages and create simple clean urls for each page. e.g my: www.mywedsite.com/createuniqueurl

This is the best advice i can give with the information provided. It's also kinda difficult to explain!

Hope this helps

[Houses]

Unfortunately that's not an option at the mo. A contract has been signed with the web design company.

[WesleySmits]

I think the best option would be to move all the content to a better URL structure and make sure to set up 301 redirects from the old URL's to the new URL's.