Google ranking 301 redirected vanity urls

[digitalhound]

We use vanity URLs for offline marketing.  An example vanity URL would be www.clientsite.com/promotion, this URL 301 redirects to a page on the site with tracking parameter ex: www.clientsite.com/mainpage?utm_source=source&utm_medium=print&utm_campaign=xyz.  We are running into issues with Google ignoring the 301 redirect and ranking these vanity URLs instead of the actual page on the website.  Any suggestions on how to resolve?

[Linda-Vassily]

And that is causing a reporting problem for you, yes? You can't tell whether traffic coming in from that URL is campaign or search traffic. I am assuming you have checked and your 301 is correctly implemented and doing what you expect.

Have you tried doubling up by using a canonical URL? It might not make a difference since Google is ignoring the 301, but it might reinforce the message.

As far as why this is happening, is there something about the vanity URL that might make Google like it so much better? Are there for example some good links to it? [I know it is part of an offline campaign, but someone may have put the URL online.]

[digitalhound]

Linda,

Correct - it is inflating the traffic we are getting from these print sources.  The redirect is generating a 301 status code so it seems like it is set-up correctly.  We have about 5 other vanity URLs for that site that Google has decided to rank as well, as far as I can tell there are no sites linking to these URLs either.  The website is database driven so the resulting URLs to have additional parameters which do make the URLs longer and not as clean as the vanity URLs.  I was thinking about trying canonical link tags.  I would just put that in the landing page and the http header for the redirected URL correct?

Thanks for your feedback

[Linda-Vassily]

Yes, that's how you could do it. Thinking about canonicals made me wonder whether this site auto-generates self-canonicals like some sites do? If there was canonical information on the vanity page pointing to itself, that might conflict with the 301 and may be sending Google mixed messages.