What's the best SEO tactics when you have a dedicated web address pointing to a page on a different site?

[Nobody1575505894822]

Hope someone can help with a question I've got about sorting out some duplicate content issues.

To simplify the question, imagine there is a website a.com which has a page a.com/newslettersignup. In addition to the a.com domain, there is also a different web address, ashortcut.com, which points to a.com/newslettersignup.

ashortcut.com is the web address that is advertised in marketing material etc.

So what is the best way then to tell Google etc. that ashortcut.com is the preferred URL for the page which sits at a.com/newslettersignup?

The advice I've read about the canonical tag, for example, doesn't cover this exact scenario so although it can support cross-domain information, I'm not sure if that's the best route to follow.

Thanks!

[antonioaraya]

If I understood, ashortcut.com always redirect to some a.com page. If this is correct, unfortunatelly Google will rank a.com page instead ashortcut.com, as the ashortcut.com page is a redirection pointing to a.com/newslettersignup.

If ashortcut.com isn't a redirection and you just duplicated the pages, yes, the option would be a rel canonical tag on both pages pointing to ashortcut.com. You should determine which domain/page has more relevancy from an SEO POV, so using Open Site Explorer from Moz will be helpful (maybe ashortcut.com doesn't have more Page Authority than a.com/newslettersignup

Let me know if I miss something.

[NickLeRoy]

Hi Mark,

You could use a canonical tag on the shortcut URL but what I would really suggest you do is redirect the shortcut with a tracking parameter.  This way all your traffic stays on your main site but you can still track your marketing efforts.

example:  ashortcut.com --> 301 redirects --> a.com/newslettersignup?ashortscut.com

just make sure that the a.com/newslettersignup URL self canonicals so that any parameter based URLs don't get indexed as duplicate content.

[Nobody1575505894822]

Thanks Antonio. In this case. ashortcut.com has keywords in its domain name whilst a.com doesn't, so that's a shame but good to know there's nothing that can be done.

[Nobody1575505894822]

Cheers Nick. It's more the SEO benefit rather than the stats that I'm interested in, but that's a handy reminder to bear in mind stats too!