UPDATED APRIL 19: Vanity URL and Web Page Redirect Criteria

While we realize that vanity urls and redirects can be helpful for various reasons, they should be used sparingly to:

1. Prevent the dilution and value of mission critical vanity URLs at the institutional level. 
2. Elevate institutional pages. 
3. Protect our search engine results rankings. If more than one department has a similar page (i.e. Apply) but more than one forces the page to live off of the root, Google and site crawlers may have a difficult time contextually determining the difference between these pages. If they are mistakenly considered duplicate, Google will choose one version to consistently show in search results over others, potentially positioning departments against one another.
4. Minimize negative impact on our site’s technical performance. 

As a result, effective:

• April 2021, you can create your own vanity url, which will include your organic group (department website) name. For example, you could create this url: www.kent.edu/your-department-url/vanity-url
• January 2021, department requests for vanity URLs and/or redirects directly off of the www.kent.edu root will be reviewed by University Communications and Marketing. For approval, requests must meet these criteria:

1. Align with institutional priorities and strategic roadmap (ex: recruitment, recognition of May 4, comprehensive campaign) with regard to subject matter and timeliness.
2. Pertain to the general public or a large group of stakeholders.
3. Be reserved for strategic initiatives, such as supporting marketing campaigns or business operations.
4. Avoid introducing conflicts or confusion related to existing websites within the kent.edu domain.
5. Not include a reference to a proprietary brand (i.e.: zoom, Qualtrics should be disallowed and instead rely on generic terminology such as virtual, remote, survey).
6. Only include requests for 301 (permanent) redirects unless the page URL will soon change.
7. In rare circumstances concerning exceptions, the request will be routed to the appropriate vice president for consideration.

Thank you for your patience.

If you have questions, please email Lin Danes, director of web services for University Communications & Marketing, at ldanes@kent.edu.