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Create a dummy url with a 301 redirect to existing page

hostelrob

4:53 pm on Mar 24, 2018 (gmt 0)

I have been looking for a while for an answer to this, but keep going down rabbit holes!

I want to have a pretty, short and sweet url for business cards, as well as being easy to remember. I want clients to get my landing page with "cornerstone" content, specifically to a section of the page using the # fragment identifier. The url would look something like this... www.mysite.com/airport-transfer-and-taxi/#regular-transfers, which is too long for a business card.
The question is this: Is there a valid reason why I can't just create a dummy or vanity url like "www.mysite.com/regular-transfers/" , then create a 301 redirect to www.mysite.com/airport-transfer-and-taxi/#regular-transfers? I tried it with the Yoast seo plugin and it works fine, but this seems far too easy! I know it will affect the analytics, but my main concern is with google and seo. The reason I say it seems too easy is that every solution I have seen such as url shorteners seem complicated and unnecessary for my needs. Is my solution wrong, or is there a better one?
Thankful for any opinions!

NickMNS

5:14 pm on Mar 24, 2018 (gmt 0)

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Welcome to Webmaster World!

I would simply create a page for the url "www.mysite.com/regular-transfers/". Include the specific content you want to show on the page and nothing more, and then link to the full page. Then don't link to this page from anywhere on the site and just point links out to where you want the user to go. Google will devalue the page, given the lack of internal inbound links. This is what you want as this page serves only as landing for the business card. So you don't really want it to appear in search. Any external links pointing to it will funnel the link juice on to the other "real" pages so that should benefit those in search as well.

Having an actual page has two advantages, one users prefer landing on the URL they typed in, two you can tweak the page with special or targeted offers and other promotions without impacting your main information page.

hostelrob

5:39 pm on Mar 24, 2018 (gmt 0)

Just learned something very useful... thanks for the great answer! I didn't do this from the start because I thought that all the external links to the "regular-transfers" page would boost its ranking and it would start to outrank my main page. I thought that inbound external links are one of the biggest ranking factors... am I missing something? I even thought about no-indexing the page, but then I'd lose any new link juice.

Just as a follow up... What if most of my clients are hotels, and they want to embed my link on their site?

Thank you for your help!

hostelrob

7:17 pm on Mar 24, 2018 (gmt 0)

OK, took a little while for your solution to sink in. Doing some research I think you're pretty much talking about a click through landing page, which definitely seems like the way to go. My only concern is where you say... "Any external links pointing to it will funnel the link juice on to the other "real" pages so that should benefit those in search as well." I want to keep my main content page higher in google for organic searches, since the user intent will always be "transfers" when doing a search. And the target keywords are similar on both pages, and I don't want to jeopardize rankings of the main page. That's why I wanted to originally point to the # fragment on the main page... so it has the effect of maximizing link juice to the main page.
Sorry if this seems like a noob question... just can't afford to hire anyone right now! :)

phranque

4:34 am on Mar 25, 2018 (gmt 0)

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i think if you do this as NickMNS described, it shouldn't cause a problem ranking your home page for branded searches.

if your landing page ends up ranking better for searches on its more specific intended purpose because it was linked to by relevant/trusted/authoritative pages, isn't that what you want?

phranque

4:35 am on Mar 25, 2018 (gmt 0)

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and welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com], hostelrob!

hostelrob

5:28 pm on Mar 26, 2018 (gmt 0)

Thank for your answers, and thank you for the welcome! Hope to contribute some day...

Quick follow up... is it ok to just no-index the landing page, or is it best just not to link to it as stated? If I no-index and "follow", I should still get any pass through link juice, correct?

not2easy

6:48 pm on Mar 26, 2018 (gmt 0)

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If you don't want that landing page to appear in search you would add the "noindex" meta-tag but then it could not have any ranking. The addition of "follow" does nothing because that is the default for Googlebot. If you want the page to show up in searches and gain inbound traffic/links then do not noindex that page.

In theory all inbound links to that page would be external and flow through to the pages they link to.