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I feel it's a best practice (from a user experience POV) to create a 301redirect when using a fictitious display URL in your PPC ads. And according to the AdWords help page (http://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=175906&rd=2) Google doesn't have an issue using a redirect. "Redirects used for tracking purposes are fine as long as the final landing page has the same domain as the display URL." I'm curious if there is ad score penalty if one does not ionclude a redirect - i.e. the user types in your display URL and gets a 404. Has anyone seen an evidence of this?

We have successfully rolled out 5 sub-domains using very industry specific KWs as the sub, e.g. familylawyers. We're rolling our an employment focused sub.and ideally would use employmentlawyers.XXX.com. However I'm tempted to use a long established (5+ years) sub-domain with a topic related KW that now hosts a non-active blog with PR3 -  employment-law.XXXX.com. It has 49 indexed pages, some with PR2. So there's potential for getting a kickstart on traffic and trust with some redirects. Should I go for instant gratification or build for the long haul with the slightly more beneficial URL KWing? I should add that this sub-domain will have thousands of pages that are geo and sub-category focused - a typical URL would be. sub-domain.XXX.com/TX/Austin/wrongful-termination-lawyers.html THX for any opinions.