How do I direct users to site page when they search vanity URL?
-
My company runs a contest via a landing page on our website. The full URL to the landing page is rather long so we have a vanity URL that we use for advertising purposes. I have a 301 on the vanity URL to the landing page URL so people visiting it directly end up where they should just fine. But if a user goes to Google and types the vanity URL into the search bar, the landing page is nowhere to be found in the results. What do I need to do to get the landing page to show in results when people search the vanity URL?
-
What I have done in a similar situation is to make the vanity URL the preferred URL. I created the vanity URL as an alias of the landing page URL and used a canonical to indicate that the vanity URL is the one to index.
-
Hi Christopher
Honestly, I wouldn't worry about that. Most people don't search URLs, so I don't know how likely you are to run into that issue.
Google will get users where they need to go, worst case to your homepage.
Hope this helps! Good luck!
-
I understand the URL won't get picked up by Google, but should a user search for the vanity URL I would like them to end up on the proper landing page.
-
Hi there
As far as I know, this isn't possible because the page doesn't technically exist and it's not linked to at all on the site, correct?
A vanity URL isn't meant to be indexed by Google, it's just supposed to be printed or utilized where you need it to appear in advertising.
You can read more here. I would look into tracking that vanity URL so you can see how your campaign is performing overall!
Hope this helps! Good luck!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
My pages are being crawled, but not indexed according to Search Console
According to Google Search Console, my pages are being crawled by not indexed. We use Shopify and about two weeks ago I selected that Traffic from all our domains redirects to our primary domain. So everything from www.url.com and https://url.com and so on, would all redirect to one url. Have added an attached image from Search Console. 6fzEQg8
Technical SEO | | HariOmHemp0 -
Site splitting value of our pages with multiple variations. How can I fix this with the least impact?
Just started at a company recently, and there is a preexisting problem that I could use some help with. Somebody please tell me there is a low impact fix for this: My company's website is structured so all of the main links used on the nav are listed as .asp pages. All the canonical stuff. However, for "SEO Purposes," we have a number of similar (not exact) pages in .html on the same topic on our site. So, for example, let's say we're a bakery. The main URL, as linked in the nav, for our Chocolate Cakes, would be http://www.oursite.com/chocolate-cakes.asp. This differentiates the page from our other cake varieties, such as http://www.oursite.com/pound-cakes.asp and http://www.oursite.com/carrot-cakes.asp. Alas, fully indexed in Google with links existing only in our sitemap, we also have: http://www.oursite.com/chocolate-cakes.html http://www.oursite.com/chocolatecakes.html http://www.oursite.com/cakes-chocolate.html This seems CRAZY to me, because wouldn't this split our search results 4 ways? Am I right in assuming this is destroying the rankings of our canonical pages? I want to change this, but problem is, none of the content is the same on any of the variants, and some of these pages rank really well - albeit mostly for long tail keywords instead of the good, solid keywords we're after. So, what I'm asking you guys is: How do I burn these .html pages to the ground without completely destroying our rankings for the other keywords? I want to 301 those pages to our canonical nav URLs but, because of the wildly different content, I'm afraid that we could see a heavy drop in search traffic. Am I just being overly cautious? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | jdsnyc20 -
Using the Google Remove URL Tool to remove https pages
I have found a way to get a list of 'some' of my 180,000+ garbage URLs now, and I'm going through the tedious task of using the URL removal tool to put them in one at a time. Between that and my robots.txt file and the URL Parameters, I'm hoping to see some change each week. I have noticed when I put URL's starting with https:// in to the removal tool, it adds the http:// main URL at the front. For example, I add to the removal tool:- https://www.mydomain.com/blah.html?search_garbage_url_addition On the confirmation page, the URL actually shows as:- http://www.mydomain.com/https://www.mydomain.com/blah.html?search_garbage_url_addition I don't want to accidentally remove my main URL or cause problems. Is this the right way this should look? AND PART 2 OF MY QUESTION If you see the search description in Google for a page you want removed that says the following in the SERP results, should I still go to the trouble of putting in the removal request? www.domain.com/url.html?xsearch_... A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more.
Technical SEO | | sparrowdog1 -
Best practice for eCommerce site migration, should I 301 redirect or match URLs on new site
Hi Guys, I have been struggling with this one for quite some time. I am no SEO expert like many of you, rather just a small business owner trying to do the right thing, so forgive me if I say something that makes no sense 🙂 I am moving our eCommerce store from one platform to another, in the process the store is getting a massive face lift. The part I am struggling with is whether I should keep my existing URL structure in place or use 301 redirects to create a cleaner looking URLs. Currently the URLs are a little long and I would love to move to a /category/product_name type format. Of course the goal is not to lose ranking in the process, I rank pretty well for several competitive phrases and do not want to create a negative impact. How would you guys handle this? Thanks, Dinesh
Technical SEO | | MyFairyTaleBooks0 -
Are you allowed to point different urls to same page
hi, i have some urls that i am either going to put on hold or thinking about pointing to one of my sites. what it is, i am looking at re-designing the pages but not until next year, so i thought i would point some of the urls to a site that i am happy with to different pages, but not sure if i am allowed this or not so for example, if i have a site on cars, and one of the url is www.rovercars.co.uk i was thinking about pointing it to the page that is about rover cars. can anyone let me know if this is allowed or not please
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Duplicate Page Warnings, hkey and repetitive URLs
Hi, we just put our association's site in SEO Moz so we can tackle SEO and we received thousands of duplicate page content and duplicate title warnings. I searched the forum before asking 🙂 Appreciate some guidance on how many things are wrong with the URL's below that are getting flagged as duplicate page content. 1. Does the repetition of the page title and section hurt SEO? 2. Does the iMIS15 in the URL (the server) detract from relevant ranking? 3. From the forum, it looks like canonical tags should be added to the version of the page that starts with .....?hkey (is there a way to predict and "canonize" these? Or recommendations?) http://www.iiba.org/imis15/IIBA/About_IIBA/IIBA_Website/About_IIBA/About_IIBA.aspx?hkey=6d821afa-e3aa-4bef-bafa-2453238d12c6 http://www.iiba.org/imis15/IIBA/About_IIBA/IIBA_Website/About_IIBA/About_IIBA.aspx Thank you.
Technical SEO | | lyndas0 -
Can search engines penalize my site if I block IPs from some countries?
I have spotted that some countries in South America generate lot's of traffic on my site and I don't want to sell my service there. Can I be penalized for blocking IPs from certain counties? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Xopie0 -
Why do I have one page showing as two url's?
My SEOMoz stats show that I have duplicate titles for the following two url's: http://www.rmtracking.com/products.php and http://www.rmtracking.com/products I have checked my server files, and I don't see a live page without the php. A while back, we converted our site from html to php, but the html pages have 301's and as you can see the page without the php is properly redirecting to the php page. Any ideas why this would show as two separate url's?
Technical SEO | | BradBorst0