Vanity URLs Canonicalization

[mattdinbrooklyn]

Hi,

So right now my vanity URLs have a lot more links than my regular homepage. They 301 redirect to the homepage but I'm thinking of canonicalizing the homepage, as well as the mobile page, to the vanity URL. Currently some of my sites have a vanity URL in a SERP and some do not. This is my way of nudging google to list them all as vanity but thought I would get everyone's opinion first.

Thanks!

[garfield_disliker]

Yeah, they don't explicitly mention 301s. But similar to a 404, a 301ed page is technically also not an "existent URL with good content." It's a permanent move, i.e., that particular URL no longer exists, though the content does exist at a new URL.

Dr. Pete wrote a good post about rel=canonicals a couple years ago that's worth checking out—numbers 3, 7, 9, and 10 in particular.

As far as the lack of consistency in the results, if you're treating all the URLs the same way, it might simply be a time lag. I could see how using 302s for a long period of time would end up showing the vanity URLs in the index. The only way I think you could consistently get a particular URL to display for a result would be to establish it as the official, "canonical" version of the page, whether you do that with 301s or rel=canonical.

[mattdinbrooklyn]

Also, I read that blog post before but it refers to a 404 not a redirected page. So it doesn't OUTRIGHT say not to do a canonical to a redirected page. It is definitely a loop though and I see the problem in that. I just really wanted an answer to the 301'd page question but I agree that it's not the best idea to do it.

[mattdinbrooklyn]

Ah ok that's evidence enough not to do it. Ever want to do something and you know it's wrong but you don't know WHY it's wrong and it's hard to find evidence to show it is? That's where I was at. I wanted to set the homepage canonical to the vanity but I knew it treated it like a 301 redirect. My only impulse to do it was that the vanity URLs were appearing in search. Ok so I won't do that.

The only other question is since Google is putting some of the vanity URLs in search and some of the homepage urls in search, is there any way to keep it consistent? It seems like there isn't since Google is disregarding the canonical (which is all to the current homepage and not the vanity) sometimes in replace of the vanity.

[garfield_disliker]

Okay... well that sounds like a mess.

Your example makes me think of this company powerequipmentdirect.com actually. They have sub-sites across a ton of different domains like mowersdirect.com, chippersdirect.com, etc., and they seem to do well in all of their verticals. So they took a completely different approach to that problem and appear to have had some success with it.

The wording of this has me a little confused though: "I'm hesitant on putting a canonical on a site that is a vanity though and 301 redirecting"

It sounds like you want to put a canonical on "blenders.companyname.com/index.jsp?c_id=ble" that points to blenders.com, but then you would 301 blenders.com back to blenders.companyname.com/index.jsp?c_id=ble. Sorry if I misunderstood you there, but is that right?

Canonicals are generally treated like 301s. So I think that would almost be like a cross-domain loop, which would probably lead G to disregard the canonical altogether. Canonicals aren't a mandatory order. If Google thinks you screwed it up they just ignore it.

In this post on the Google Webmaster Central blog they mention it's necessary "rel=canonical points to an existent URL with good content."

[mattdinbrooklyn]

The answer is that it's an old jsp site. So it's a long domain that's not good. So say this, say my company does appliances (they don't but let's pretend) and they own refrigerators.com and dryers.com and blenders.com. They have a bad domain structure and have been doing dryers.companyname.com/index.jsp?c_id=dry for years. This, of course, isn't as easy to link to. Also, to make things worse, they have 302'd dryers.com. So, after changing the response codes from 302 to 301, some of the SERPs started to include the vanity URL (i.e. dryers.com) but didn't include others (i.e. say blenders.com is still blenders.companyname.com/index.jsp?c_id=ble). I'd like them to have all the same SERP listing and it's ideal for them to be the vanity (wouldn't you rather dryers.com vs that long ugly URL). Also I know this is not the long term fix (someday it'll all be company.com/dryers but that day is not today).

So my question really is: I'm hesitant on putting a canonical on a site that is a vanity though and 301 redirecting but I have no evidence to back this up. Can you help me find the answer with evidence for this?

[garfield_disliker]

That sounds like a bad idea to me—almost like you're approaching this inside out.  The old Wil Reynolds' concept "real company shit" is a guiding principle here.

"It’s our attempt to take an industry we love and encourage all of us to do the same things REAL COMPANIES DO!  Real companies rarely build their business on shortcuts and tricks, yet we as SEO’s were winning so often with shortcuts and tricks." http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/rcs-how-we-do-it-with-a-live-example/

I think, rather than trying to make the most of the link equity that's hitting your vanity URLs, I would question why your home page, i.e., your company/brand is not as good at attracting links as your vanity URLs are.