Hi Tony,

I wouldn't necessarily register any new promotional URLs. Not only do you have the added nightmare of administering them, but you can actually get penalised for doing so. The search engines especially Google know about who has registered the domain and would most likely consider these promotional URLs to be jump sites and therefore spam, which can lead to penalties and possible expulsion from the search engines all together. 

I would concentrate your efforts on bringing people to your home page and then direct them to the relevant section. This has an added benefit of giving the visitor a better understanding of your company and the products you offer and can help to develop long term trust and better branding.

In summary, concentrate on developing a well structured site with sub sections or sub domains if required, instead of promotional URLs.

Hope this is of help.

Andrew Allfrey
www.e-prominence.co.uk

On 14:29:48 1 September 2005 twc wrote:

Does anyone have views on when its best to use a promotional URL to send a user to a specific section of a website - and when its best to use your homepage URL and let the user navigate to the relevant page. (or use to use a /suffix off the main URL)

I'm working with a company that are launching new products and services on a regular basis - and each time the marcomms team want to use a specific promotional URL

I'm concerned we'll end up registering hundreds of URL's for different campaigns. (mainly B2B)

What's wrong with that ?? - well, nothing I can think of - URL's are cheap enough and I suppose you just let them expire when the campaign is over - however, doesn't it weaken the overall brand ??

Any thoughts ?

Rgds

Tony