Keywords in Vanity URL
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If I set up a vanity URL that just 301's to the main site, do the search engines look at the keywords in the vanity URL when determing how to rank the site.
For example, if I set up a vanity URL of www.coolnewtechgear.com, and redirect it to www.company.com/products/, would the search engines view the keywords of cool, new, tech, and gear and associate that with the page it's getting redirected to? Or does it ignore the vanity URL and only look at the content of the page itself?
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Yes, that's exactly what it is. Our company uses them a lot for print collateral so the URL is easy to remember, not long, etc. No content lives on the vanity URL, it just get redirected to somewhere else. Thanks Keri.
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If the vanity URL is a brand new domain with no content, there shouldn't be any SEO value passed from the keywords in the URL in the scenario you describe.
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