I’m flying with Aer Lingus tomorrow to Dublin so I wanted to just check some details quickly so I did a brand search for “aer lingus” the big first issue is the top result is a Google Campaign tracking URL, that should not be there.
That is going to both ruin their tracking metrics in Google Analytics but also means that they will think a majority of their branded organic traffic from Google is actually coming from their “Gomera Walking Newsletter” email campaign from April 2013 and not from Google organic traffic. Not really a great start to their grasp on digital media but it can be a really easy fix for them to implement by one redirecting this old URL but also implementing canonical URLs.
The third result also should be there but if Aer Lingus stop using 302 redirects and consider some URL rewriting to clean up the default URL that probably wouldn’t be a bad thing and could resolve some issues. The big issue is that the 3 results shown above in Google are duplicate content as they are actually exactly the same homepage and going to make reporting and analysis almost impossible for their poor web analytics or SEO manager to do their jobs properly. The other issue is that their ‘Home” link shown highlighted below in yellow is actually linking to another alternative version of the homepage URL /home/index.jsp so now we have atleast 4 versions of the homepage.
I didn’t really dig much deeper but just a few issues I noticed easily that should be fixed asap and I best get packing for my trip!