Marketing URLs - best practices

[ecnic]

Hi,

We do have a consistent url structure like

http://www.company.com/productname-london
http://www.company.com/productname-auckland
etc.

Now marketing wants to include each URL in our yearly printed catalogue.
Out of marketing reasons (I agree with that), they think the URLs are too long and should be for example:

http://www.company/london
http://www.company/auckland
etc.

Our brochure is very important for direct customers and we have a target group that actively uses the internet and social media and therefore will pick up these links.

Even if we do correct redirects in the background - couldn't we have the problem
that we have a double set of urls?

What do you think about that?

[ecnic]

Will do that, thanks

[ecnic]

Thank you, Julich

[saibose]

The only thing after redirect (301) is that you should tell Google which URL is relevant for it to crawl and rank. Eg, for marketing purposes, you may have the URL, www.company.com/productname-cityname on your website and have a URL www.company.com/london on your brochures, but you must tell Google which URL you want to promote. People use Google to recall URLs as well (thats the reason why facebook is one of the most searched terms on Google). Therefore, it might be wise to do a 301 from the time it goes live or put a rel=canonical from the start so that if Google indexes the new URLs by chance, it knows which URL it should consider for ranking.

[Julich]

As long as you correctly implement redirects using 301 code (permanent redirect), to inform search engines your pages have definitely moved to new URLs, there should not be any problem.