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That is a long URL, but I don't think shortening it will help in terms of SEO. Google is generally good at understanding the structure of your site without the structure of URLs. They are also good at determining the topic without the use of the URL. In my experience, the work from changing the URL is more than it would help. If you find a reason to change the URL structure in the future that is very necessary (new CMS as an example), update the structure then. Until then, unless you are getting feedback from your users that it is annoying them, I'd leave them as is.

Hi James, I always prefer shorter over longer URLs. They look a lot cleaner which I believe Google likes. However saying that, I don't think there is a preference over one or the other as long as your website structure is SEO friendly. What are the pros to the longer URL for you? Cheers, Casey

Hi James, I don't think you have anything to worry about here. I'm assuming you publish the content on your WordPress site first, before you send out the web-based email? If that's the case, Google is pretty good at identifying the original publisher of content and devaluing other web pages that feature the same content. If you are worried about it and can easily add "noindex" tags to these web emails, do it. If you can't "noindex" them, I wouldn't be concerned about any duplicate content "penalties". Cheers, David

Hi James, Great question! My two cents would be as follows: Firstly, I'm assuming that there is no way that you can make the responsive pages show up with the same domain as the current non-responsive site. I'm guessing that you are building these pages on a different platform than the main site, but it is possible to use multiple platforms on a single domain (for instance, many websites build their blog on Wordpress and their main site using something different) - so I'm curious about why in this case you are choosing to make it a totally separate domain. Assuming that this is the only way to do it, my first question would be: are these pages something that would be indexed normally on the main site? You mention they are 'Action' pages - search engines may not need to index transaction pages, for example, where the only purpose is to submit a payment or sign up for something. Unless you also expect these pages to rank as entry pages, but if users are navigating to these pages primarily from a different landing page, they may not be relevant to search engines at all. If this is the case, and you are still concerned about appearing to send users to a different website, you could consider making the donate button to these pages initially link to a page on the existing domain (like www.maindomain.org/secure) which could then immediately redirect to the secure version. You could nofollow this link and block the transaction pages on the other domain from search (I usually see no reason to have purely transactional pages indexed, but I may be missing some context in this case.) However, this may run the risk of looking like you are trying to do something sneaky with redirects. You could also include a note on the first page (the one the user is on before being taken to the secure site), next to that 'donate'/'signup' button/link that states "by clicking this link, you will be taken to our secure platform at 'domain.com' to complete your donation/signup". I do like the idea of including the name of the charity in this secondary domain if possible, to help make it clear that they are connected. You could optimize the pages' meta data to include the name of the charity as well. I don't believe there is a negative consequence (generally speaking) to sending a user off-site - unless you appear to be running some sort of 'doorway' page scheme, or using sneaky redirects to show Google one thing and the user something else. My one caveat: I'm not sure what you mean by "booting" the user- I could see it potentially seeming problematic if the user is automatically sent somewhere without choosing to navigate to the other domain...it could even fall under the category of 'malicious behavior'. But as long as the user is choosing to click on a link that takes them to a 'donate' or 'sign up' page, even if it's hosted on a different domain, I don't see that creating a major issue for Google.

Penalties are never a guarantee and we only have best practices to follow. The risk is there for sure. Duplicate content is never a great plan and for a 5-15 page website, the risk is not worth the reward in my books. Hire a copy writer and have them re-write it. What a GP offers from clinic to clinic are similar but what's unique is the doctor and location. Then do your typical local optimization work with listings, places and basic directories and you should be golden. This post will support my advice and provide context for a much larger business with a similar question: https://moz.com/community/q/duplicate-content-local-seo-250-locations Hope that helps. Brent

Hey James, I'm afraid I don't know enough about this, either. It's my understanding that local reviews play a part in Siri results. How is your client doing on Yelp? I find it odd that Siri can find zero results for your query in a large city like Denver.

Nice update Kevin!  And a good use-case of sites that could really benefit from AMP: heavy mobile traffic / users, content heavy pages, ability to mitigate technical constraints. Call-in based service businesses in competitive markets would also be prime candidates for AMP as well.