Understanding URL structures is one of the few technical SEO flavors that every search professional must fully understand to be successful. Rand did an excellent Whiteboard Friday on the topic of Sub-domains vs. Sub-folders and 301s vs. rel=canonical tags (and it's a must watch), but many business owners like to leverage print and social media with their website and they prefer a sub-domain because it is easier to include in print or in a Facebook post.
Today I wanted to cover some fun and effective uses of Vanity URLs we've employed at Image Freedom that'll allow you to benefit from SEO best practices without sacrificing ease of access for your users.
What is a Vanity URL?
A vanity URL could be a completely unique URL totally removed from your main URL. It could also be a sub-domain that uses a 301 Redirect to point to a page deep within a sub-folder to make it easier for your users to get there. What separates a vanity URL from a micro-site URL or a sub-domain URL is that we never show Google that URL, it is purely for users to type in, such as in print banners or on a vehicle wrap, or for use on social media postings.
Using a Vanity URL for Multiple Keyword Sites
Let's say you own a company that deals with air conditioning, plumbing and electrical work. This is a complex group of keywords, so you want all the help you can get. Some wisdom might suggest that you create three websites--one that focuses on AC keywords, one that focuses on plumbing and one for electrical services. This wouldn't be an awful idea, but you'd be optimizing and building links for three unique domains and those domains would not share authority with each other. You would literally be tripling the work, too.
This is an excellent example of where Vanity URLs could give you extra options that still capitalize on SEO best practices. For example, say, our main company website is acme.com, but we might also register ACMAAir.com, ACMEPlumbing.com and ACMEElectric.com, one for each area of our business. Instead of building a website for each of these lines of services, we would choose our biggest line of business to be the primary keyword on the homepage (e.g., AC if you live in Texas as we do) and you would then place your plumbing keywords in https://www.acme.com/plumbing/ and your electrical keywords in https://www.acme.com/electrician/.
It is important that you don't self-cannibalize your keywords. So while I have assigned the AC keywords to the homepage, you then also don't want to create an AC landing page that repeats those keywords. If you must create a page that talks about AC (and in this case you do for the users sake), this is a great time to use the the rel=canonical tag on the AC page and point that topic back to the homepage. This way you are not fighting with your own sitemap for keyword prominence, which would hurt the chances for either page to rank. Self-cannibalization is one of the most common SEO mistakes we see in sitemaps. Fortunately, it's one of the easiest to fix.
To start out, our top-level sitemap would look something like this:
So now that we've laid out our top level sitemap, we can assess the use of Vanity URLs. We'll use an example using wraps, the all-over vinyl coatings applied to vehicles to highlight brands and their services.
Many companies use wraps on their vehicles and desire to include the URL in an easy to remember formatting. However, different lines of business often have their own vehicles or printed materials. This is where our Vanity URL comes in. To promote our plumbing pages and provide a great URL for use on our plumbers trucks, we could use ACMEPlumbing.com. Then, instead of building a whole unique site there, we simply 301 redirect that URL to https://www.acme.com/plumbing/. Google will then index your sub-folder for plumbing, but your users will be able to easily remember and type in your ACMEPlumbing.com vanity URL, satisfying both groups.
Our final top level sitemap would look something like this:
Google cannot read the text contained within an image. The crawlers can, however, read the file name and the alt attribute. But if you want to include keywords on a page where you otherwise shouldn't (such as placing plumbing keywords on your air conditioning-focused homepage) then using images is a great way to include language for the user, but then hide that language from Google. In the above example, I might include banners that talk about plumbing or electrical services but include that messaging solely within an image so it does not dilute my AC keyword placement. If you must include a contrary keyword (such as plumbing in this example) then make sure the keyword is a link to the appropriate landing page. In this case it would link through to https://www.acme.com/plumbing/.
Using a Vanity URL for a Franchise
In businesses with multiple locations, and those with franchises, it can be very tempting to segregate all of your different websites with unique URLs or on sub-domains. An excellent compromise here is to do both.
If I am selling cupcakes out of my ACMECupcakes.com franchise, I might want to register the ACMECupcakesSA.com domain name for San Antonio, but by placing my franchise offsite, not only am I starting from scratch with a brand new domain name (that will have no history or authority), I am also not able to share in the authority and history already created by the head office franchise at ACMECupcakes.com.
This is an issue I see quite a lot, and it winds up seriously hurting the franchise's SEO opportunities because the franchisee is not able to share in the authority and ranking potential of the franchiser. Thus the new franchisee has to start at zero and work their way up the rankings. By utilizing a vanity URL, I can point my ACMECupcakesSA.com URL to ACMECupcakes.com/SanAntonio and still have a nice short URL to place on my business cards
Each new city would have a sub-folder dedicated to that city, with appropriate keyword placement to rank in that city and appropriate internal linking so that the search engines know what the page is about. The business could them purchase a unique URL like ACMECupcakesAustin.com or ACMECupcakesDFW.com and have that URL seamlessly 301'd over to their sub-folder.
The fun thing about the 301 Redirect is that if anyone accidentally links to ACMECupcakesSA.com that link authority will be sent along through the 301 to the San Antonio sub-page. So even if you get links to either URL, Google still knows which to index and assign the authority to because of the 301.
Have Your Cake and Canonical It Too!
The key to any of the tactics listed above is the desire to control what Google indexes, and under what URL a given page is associated. The more indexed URLs you have, the more divided your authority becomes. Just as important, as you create new sub-pages, you don't want those sub-pages to be starting completely from scratch with no history and no authority to speak of. The idea is to work smarter so we don't have to work harder. The above techniques and tactics like them are just one way that you can have it both ways--capitalizing on the benefits of SEO while still leaving you all the tools to promote your sub-page as if it were a site all its own.
Summary Points
Sub-Domain: Google does not give a sub-domain equal authority as the domain it is under, thus in most cases the correct thing to use is a Sub-Folder. You can still 301 redirect a Sub-Domain to a Sub-Folder to use that Sub-Domain as a Vanity URL if you really really want to.
Sub-Folder: Sub-folders inherit the authority of the domain they are a part of, but you can still use a Vanity URL and a 301 redirect to give a direct URL path to the content on the sub-folder. The 301 redirect will send Google to the destination sub-folder path (which will be indexed), and the Vanity URL itself will not be indexed.
Vanity URL: A Vanity URL is a URL not meant to be indexed by Google, but instead might be included in print materials, on vehicle wraps, or as a link shared on social media. The Vanity URL is forwarded to a main site URL (often times a sub-folder) and only the destination is indexed by Google, the Vanity URL itself remains a useful (but passive to Google) tool.
Duplicate Content: With micro-websites it is important to remember that Google will lump websites together that have the same website content/copy. Thus it is important to write unique copy for each page that you want to rank, even if the content is very similar, it cannot be semantically identical otherwise it could hurt all micro-site’s chances of ranking.
Hey Matthew - great post!
I'd be wary about the advice of rel=canonical'ing your inner page to your homepage if they both target the same keywords. In your example, if you're really trying to rank for the 'HVAC' keywords and want to leverage the HP equity, then I guess that makes sense. But on a large site, the homepage is better off being generic, and pushing relevancy and equity (through internal and external links) to your HVAC page and allowing it to get indexed. That was the one confusing part of the post.
In addition, I'd be wary about using a vanity domain or URL in Google Maps / Google My Business Listings due to the idea of citations and 3rd party listing sites scraping that associated URL and thus linking to it across the web. How do you handle this issue? I imagine the best practice here needs to be using the "real" deep store location page URL on all local listing sites including GMBL. Even with a 301 redirect in place, I don't trust that citations would always get counted following a 301 redirect.... (an unfortunate byproduct of a very primitive local algo).
The rest made perfect sense and it's a great 'have your cake and eat it too' method of branding and UX (for print and offline marketing) with 301 redirecting or canonical'ing to the post you want ranked / indexed. Great sum up post!
Hi Ari - Thank you for the feedback! In specific cases like this, where the homepage is in a better position to rank (and more quickly) than an interior page, I'd not want the homepage to be generic. At the same time, we want to make sure there is still a content page for folks who want to read more about the specific HVAC services. This particular example comes from a real site, and it worked perfectly.
We have an e-commerce page where we deployed this on as well, they have a core product but it also has some side uses, so even though there is a category page for that core topic, we canonicaled it back to the homepage which was better optimized to rank for that main keyword.
It certainly isn't for everyday use, unless the need is super clear, you're absolutely right about that.
As for Google Maps - I would agree with you that when possible we want to use the deep link, but hopefully when we setup our sitemap we would make important pages like a location page not be several slashes deep in its URL.
Even in the case of a 301, the authority that passes isn't 100%, so even if we were 100% sure that the citations would pass through cleanly on the 301 we'd still lose a little bit of juice in the translation, so unless we were in a big business situation where the authority was already huge I'd use the real URL in any place where Google might index it, such as you mention on Google Maps.
I manage a blog since a few years ago, I mix a variety of topics and then think that it is wrong.My main domain is biluping.com but then I intend to separate the topic with various subdomains, for example, the topic of astronomy at the subdomain astronomy.biluping.com
how these tips work on me, especially the blogger platform does not provide a subfolder. thank you
Or you can simply use a category / inner page and all the astronomy related posts in that category, like :
biluping.com/astronomy
biluping.com/astronomy/some-post-about-astronomy
This way, you keep all the link juice and authority within the main domain and the new posts will naturally rank higher because of the increased authority.
Nice to see some SEO advice that relates to non digital advertising Matthew! I am ashamed to say that I hadn't thought about utilising images to display content about other services without cannibalising keywords on the site - so thank you for that, will have to look at incorporating it on my site because (at least in my business) cross selling opportunities are not to be missed...
This is one of the reasons we promote that SEO needs to be involved from the concept stage through design and programming, if you can plan for these little "flow tricks" so that the right pages have the right keyword placements, even if they have to talk about some minimal side topics with images, then you're planning in advance for those things and it isn't something that usually looks really bad if tacked on after the design and programming has been completed.
I love this article. Some really tricky things whihc usually may slip our of mind. Like use text in images where you dont wish to mention keywords. nice one. Also redirecting from keywords domain to sub folder is also a good idea, just be careful not to do too many KW match domains redirects.
Self-cannibalization may be one of the most common SEO mistakes in sitemaps, and the easiest to fix. However, it’s also one of the easiest to “avoid.” Keywords like “plumbing” and “air conditioning” are simply too short to compete. The long-tail keyword approach makes far more sense.
Each page of every website should have a carefully thought out keyword plan. This way, there’s no fear of keyword duplication. Build it right the first time. Otherwise, you’re left scrambling trying to fix it later. I like the suggestions of where to hide duplicate keywords, if they must exist, like in the messaging of a banner image.
Most certainly, and the plumbing keywords label is listed as plural to imply the keyword group not just "plumbing" as a standalone keyword. Sorry if that was not clear.
Every Green Post of The blogs. its make easy to understand the 301.Thank you for sharing...
This is an interesting concept. One thing that I'm confused about though is the idea of using a canonical to point from an internal page to a home page. In Google's guidelines, it says that canonicals should be used on pages which have "similar or duplicate content" - but not as a cure-all for any two pages on a site which are optimized for the same keywords. So unless the home page and inner page have "similar or duplicate content" (which is not all that likely), it seems to me that a canonical should not be used.
Anyway, that's my two cents.
In the example above - and it's a real example of an AC Company that we work with - the homepage is optimized exclusively for their Air Conditioning keywords, thus then the Air Conditioning sub-page becomes optimizationally (it's a word I swear) redundant. Thus we canonical it back to the homepage because and only because the keyword targets are the same.
Unless your off-site authority is just astounding, it's generally a bad idea to have two pages targeting the same keywords, vs. having one definitive "this is the Air Conditioning page" target to promote to Google.
As Ron Swanson says, "Don't half ass two things, whole ass one thing."
Ok this may not be directly related to the topic but it has been troubling me for sometime that how does Google know whether a particular paragraph within a content is the main topic of that article or not. For example, in this article you used the term acme cup cakes. (assume it was in text and not in an image) If a website like Wikihow publishes an article related to the SEO Niche and within that article also if they use the same term acme cup cakes "order cupcakes online" etc in order to explain a particular concept clearly to the reader. (Just as you have done in this article) How would Google gauge the quality of these keywords and would Google consider them baseless and irrelevant? I understand if these keywords were posted from a site like Moz or Search Engine Land Google will know because of the niche of the site but for something like wikihow they cover almost every topic you can think of!
Also if Google does consider these keywords then how much link juice would flow if you link out from such keywords and if Google ignores it would there be any harm in linking out using such keywords? (i.e. should it be no followed?)
Apparently there IS a company called ACME Markets that sells cupcakes, oops.
So what you're talking about falls into the overall SEO theory that Google looks at relevance in links, and assigns a higher value when the link is within the "six degrees of seperation" of that topic. So if my primary product is Tennis Rackets, I might want links from Tennis websites, articles about Tennis Balls, websites selling Tennis Shoes, etc, but I'd also like links from general sports pages, exercise pages, team activities pages, etc, because those links are "close enough" in topic.
There are certainly generic links as well, but if your primary product is Tennis Rackets and your links are all coming from websites that sell HDMI Cables, the relevancy won't be there, so you'll still get some value, but it might be risky if you were ever manually reviewed. Google might ask "why is this HDMI Cable website linking to this Tennis Racket site?" and decide that your link profile is unnatural.
So this Moz page, because it is on an SEO focused website, is not going to rank incredibly well for my ACME Cupcakes keywords, especially considering that there are other pages much more cupcake focused out there talking about those same phrases.
Hope I'm not too late to the game but just saw this great post and have a question. I set up a vanity url for a client a while ago. The vanity redirects to the main home page. My client asked me today why he could not search for the vanity and have his site show in the search results. I think I know why since the vanity url is not indexed - but is there a way to do this?
This post is old, google has change their policities since then?
Hey Matthew,
Thank you for this excellent post! I have a slight twist I'd like to add to the conversation, and get your opinion... We have a client with tattoo removal customers and anti-aging skin care customers who are served the same content on the home page, and the content alternates as it it promoted on his marketing channels; ex: one week, tattoos, next week, skin tightening. Because he owns a GREAT(and currently inactive) tattoo removal URL, I’m splitting his sites content into /tattoo and /skincare and using your great advice to 301 redirect from his tattoo vanity URL. What I can’t decide on, is whether or not to purchase and utilize a second vanity URL for the skin care side of the business. The home page URL is VERY keyword skincare-y, but has also served up tattoo content for several years. The biggest reason I want to purchase the second vanity URL for skincare is because of the URL I get from dividing up the site’s content: ‘skincare.com/skincare/remove-agespots for example. I’d rather have ‘youlookfabulous'.com/remove-agespots. But his home page URL is REALLY great for skin care. I feel like I've gotten myself tangled up in this and the answer is obvious, and I'm just missing it :)
Hi Matthew,
this is a very informative post. Am I correct in assuming that a 301 redirect would also be used for simply redirecting the following?
www.ACMEElectrician.com to www.acme.com
Re franchise approach - To clarify, are you saying that webmasters should create a franchise sub-folder and sub domain for a new franchisee location (which will each need to be populated with unique content etc to avoid duplicate content); then 301 the sub domain as a vanity url to the sub-folder? Updating content on the sub-folder and sub domain will be challenging for a business with several franchisees.
Thanks :)
If you're going to use a sub-domain I would only use it as a forwarding domain, and have it forward to the sub-folder. Avoid using sub-domains at all costs. The thing with franchises is that if they each have their own website then they will each have to have their own links built, authority generated, etc. Which is fine if you have the budget for that but it's a ton of work. So you want to share the authority that the whole franchise has with every offshoot team, vs. requiring each team to build their own.
Always use a sub-folder unless there's no choice but to use a sub-domain, but even then use a sub-folder and find a way to not have to use a sub-domain lol.
Great post. I will have re read it a few times because this is new for me. I wish i can make good use of this in a few years if i manage to get my own plumbing service haha. Anyway this is good info for small businesses and not so small.
I love the content on Moz, but a lot of the bigger content tends to speak towards bigger businesses, and that makes sense because a lot of SEOs work for big businesses, but we tend to help more small and medium sized businesses with their SEO and sometimes the advice is very different.
I believe the lack of content that targets small businesses, especially franchises, is why franchise SEO is usually so bad, and so integrated at the corporate level that when a franchisee contacts us to help them with their SEO there is little that we can do because the franchiser has set things up so poorly and forces them to use a sub-domain site or a template that didn't consider SEO when it was built, or was built by someone who shouldn't be (but is) claiming that their sites are SEO friendly.
Thank you for the comment, small businesses need love too!
Isn't this the premise of how you build pages on Wordpress with sub-urls?: companyx.com/hvac or companyz.com/electrical. Isn't quite helpful to maintain you best keyword for that page within the sub-url for that page? Do like the idea of using 301 redirect pages too. Wordpress has a few really good plug-ins that are made especially for re-routing to different url websites. Thanks for the tips and bringing to everyone's attention. Love using sub-url pages, as page authority increases, the more powerful that sub-url gets. Thanks!
Is this article talking about 'True' vanity URLs? ( I don't ask that in a rude manner ) The reason I ask is because the web design software we use creates nasty long URLs for our pages and allows us to create vanity URLs, what the user see.
So the original URL is
https://www.domain.com/cs/Satellite?c=Page&childpagename=COH2%2FCOH2_Layout&rendermode=live&pagename=COH2
Our Vanity URL is
https://www.domain.com/COH2
Obviously the Orginal URL the system spits out is disgusting.
To a search engine what gets the JUICE?
According to this Vanity URLs are never shown to the SE and only for Users - so does that mean that the long disgusting URL is what gets credit with the SE?
I ask because we were looking to localize URLs, will doing that even matter if the long URL gets the credit?
We want at url that reads www.domain.com/mike-johnson-insurance-rep-seattle-wa for localization but we also want a url that reads www.domain.com/mike-johnson for business cards
Can anyone help me understand what link is going to get the juice or rank from search engines?
This is a good question, you're thinking about the right problem, but you're talking about a different kind of vanity URL - in your example you're talking about a "search friendly URL". There are a couple of easy ways to see what Google is indexing, if they are indexing that long form URL or the shortened one.
Go to Google and type in "site:domain.com" and this will give you a full list of the pages that Google had indexed. As you sort through the list you're looking to see is it the long form URL or the short form URL that gets redirected and ultimately indexed by Google.
When you type in the long form URL does it resolve to the short URL or vica versa? Are your internal links sending to the long form URL or the shortened URL? Is the long or short URL in your XML sitemap? These are all ways to check to see which signals you are sending to Google, and depending what you find you can use a redirect or a canonical to help steer Google in the right direction.
I'd be more than happy to look at the site for you if you want to reach out offline and we can quickly tell you which is which if you have trouble with the above steps. Hope this helps!