Yikes man. I'm not saying you're lying or an idiot. I'm saying I think you may have made the wrong conclusions from what you were told. On top of that, it seems like you are incorrectly applying them here. That advice might be fine in other situations, but it didn't seem to actually address the original question here.

You don't have to be so defensive when somebody disagrees with you. I put scare quotes around "JM" and "personally" because for one, with just initials it's not fair for me to conclude you're saying John Mueller (though that seems to be what you're implying), and secondly, with the "personally" thrown in there that seemed like kind of silly name dropping.

Also, this is up for debate but I don't think John Mueller has reached a level of recognition that we can just call him JM and assume everybody knows what we're all talking about. Even if you said RF in here I'm not sure we'd know who you're talking about.

I think, like Eric said, rather than mentioning Mueller has personally given you some inside secrets that is counter to Google's public statements on the topic, it would be nice to provide a link to a study that supports the claim, because it is counter to what most of the community believes.

Yeah, I'm with you on this Eric.

It seemed to me he was talking about their PPC efforts—in particular where they host their landing pages—affecting their rankings across all their franchises on the whole.

We could possibly factor in how PPC affects organic CTRs here, but there have been a few studies that show PPC can actually benefit organic CTRs when the ad and organic result are both on the first page... and at any rate he didn't single out overlapping paid search ads and organic listings. He specifically focused on where the landing pages were hosted. Also, to my knowledge, CTR as a signal isn't going to be so significant it would cause problems for the franchise to underperform across multiple locations.

It also sounds like Josh here may have misinterpreted what "JM" "personally" told him. Paying attention to traffic on all your channels ≠ Google takes PPC signals into account in their organic algos. Sure, PPC can affect traffic from organic. Does it directly affect your rankings? No.

Another consideration here: Is that competitive ad space, i.e., are there multiple ads on those keywords? If that's the case then why vacate that space?

And again, I can't reiterate this enough, who would really think changing the domain of PPC landing pages is going to be the magic solution for the SEO campaign?

There's absolutely no reason their PPC efforts—as described—should have a "negative effect" on your organic rankings.

Are you right about staying on brand? Almost definitely. Would it be better for visitors to know what the actual domain is so they're more likely to become repeat converters down the line? Probably. Is it easier for customers to refer your client when they know the name/actual domain? Totally.

But would sending paid search visits to an off-site landing page have a negative effect on your rankings? Nope. As long as they're out of the index, no.

Maybe those landing pages on an external domain convert better than sending them to their usual domain though. What happens if the client follows your advice and the phone stops ringing from PPC and you're still not getting rankings? Are you comfortable with that?

Do you really think that them pointing their ads to the actual domain is going to increase your rankings? There's no way.

TBH I think it's pretty fair for the PPC agency to push back on this. I would.

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.

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."

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.

Those are ajax hash fragments https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/174992?hl=en

I don't think consolidation is the best path. I would take a close look at this article from Google's guidelines, and pay particular attention to their recommendations for ccTLDs and geotargeting settings in WMT.

There's absolutely no reason their PPC efforts—as described—should have a "negative effect" on your organic rankings.

Are you right about staying on brand? Almost definitely. Would it be better for visitors to know what the actual domain is so they're more likely to become repeat converters down the line? Probably. Is it easier for customers to refer your client when they know the name/actual domain? Totally.

But would sending paid search visits to an off-site landing page have a negative effect on your rankings? Nope. As long as they're out of the index, no.

Maybe those landing pages on an external domain convert better than sending them to their usual domain though. What happens if the client follows your advice and the phone stops ringing from PPC and you're still not getting rankings? Are you comfortable with that?

Do you really think that them pointing their ads to the actual domain is going to increase your rankings? There's no way.

TBH I think it's pretty fair for the PPC agency to push back on this. I would.

Yikes man. I'm not saying you're lying or an idiot. I'm saying I think you may have made the wrong conclusions from what you were told. On top of that, it seems like you are incorrectly applying them here. That advice might be fine in other situations, but it didn't seem to actually address the original question here.

You don't have to be so defensive when somebody disagrees with you. I put scare quotes around "JM" and "personally" because for one, with just initials it's not fair for me to conclude you're saying John Mueller (though that seems to be what you're implying), and secondly, with the "personally" thrown in there that seemed like kind of silly name dropping.

Also, this is up for debate but I don't think John Mueller has reached a level of recognition that we can just call him JM and assume everybody knows what we're all talking about. Even if you said RF in here I'm not sure we'd know who you're talking about.

I think, like Eric said, rather than mentioning Mueller has personally given you some inside secrets that is counter to Google's public statements on the topic, it would be nice to provide a link to a study that supports the claim, because it is counter to what most of the community believes.

Those are ajax hash fragments https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/174992?hl=en

Yeah, I'm with you on this Eric.

It seemed to me he was talking about their PPC efforts—in particular where they host their landing pages—affecting their rankings across all their franchises on the whole.

We could possibly factor in how PPC affects organic CTRs here, but there have been a few studies that show PPC can actually benefit organic CTRs when the ad and organic result are both on the first page... and at any rate he didn't single out overlapping paid search ads and organic listings. He specifically focused on where the landing pages were hosted. Also, to my knowledge, CTR as a signal isn't going to be so significant it would cause problems for the franchise to underperform across multiple locations.

It also sounds like Josh here may have misinterpreted what "JM" "personally" told him. Paying attention to traffic on all your channels ≠ Google takes PPC signals into account in their organic algos. Sure, PPC can affect traffic from organic. Does it directly affect your rankings? No.

Another consideration here: Is that competitive ad space, i.e., are there multiple ads on those keywords? If that's the case then why vacate that space?

And again, I can't reiterate this enough, who would really think changing the domain of PPC landing pages is going to be the magic solution for the SEO campaign?

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."