Use of Vanity URLs and Avoid SEO Self-Cannibalization
Understanding URL structures is one of the few technical SEO flavors that every search professional must fully understand to be successful. 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 we 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
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.
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.
Using a Vanity URL for a Franchise
If I am selling cupcakes out of my ACMECupcakes.com franchise, we might want to register the ACMECupcakesSA.com domain name for San Antonio, but by placing my franchise offsite, not only am we starting from scratch with a brand new domain name (that will have no history or authority), we also not able to share in the authority and history already created by the head office franchise at ACMECupcakes.com.
This is an issue we 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, we 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.
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.
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https://moz.com/blog?page=69
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