Maybe you haven't heard about vanity URLs yet. Maybe you do. Vanity domains are domain or subdomain names created to provide easy to remember URLs while promoting a brands they represent.

Vanity URLs are used for marketing campaign microsites or new movie releases. Recently I saw a bus ad about a horror movie called "A Very Short Life" which displayed a URL www.averyshortlife.com. On movie trailer for "Twilight" I saw on TV, it shows www.twilightthemovie.com. By looking at the URL, we can tell that this website is about the popular film. That’s the advantage of vanity URLs.

However in SEO, there are also disadvantages of vanity URLs, if handled improperly. As more movies are produced, more vanity URLs are created, requiring new domain names in the process. Since it’s almost impossible to get a more generic domain name like "www.twilight.com" for the movie, films have to resort to register new domain names, combining the title and "movie" in some cases. Worse, many of these movie websites display only a video trailer and the sites are embedded in Flash. This results to a new website that has few links and low search visibility. Although we expect that a popular movie’s vanity URL, say www.meettheparents.com (a personal favorite) can easily get links from fans and critics, it only benefits the site. In the long run, once popularity fades, the site remains on its own.

A good practice to deal with vanity URLs is to redirect them to their parent company’s website. In the case of www.meettheparents.com, it can redirect to Universal Pictures’ website under a subfolder so it will be like www.universalpictures.com/movies/meet-the-parents/. The benefit of this is that the film’s landing page instantly gets high trust factor from search engines, by virtue of sitting on an long-established and authoritative site. At the same time, the parent site also benefits from the link acquired by the movie. Information on future movies under Universal Pictures can then be easily found.

This advice applies to many other sites that have products that warrant special vanity URLs:

Cars: For carmaker website
Car Model 2010 (carmodel2010.com) -> www.carcompany.com/showcase/carmodel2010

Properties: For property developer website
The Cullinan (thecullinan.com.hk) -> www.skhp.com/properties/thecullinan

Artists: For entertainment management company website
Artist Name (artistsname21.com) -> www.entertainment-company.com/artists/artistname21

To simplify things, sites that contain large amount of content that require complicated architecture don’t have to follow this guideline; they are already big enough that surely they have their own audience and command good amount of links.