I love The Guardian, I really do. They’ve got a great website (which they’re slowly redesigning), their paper looks so much better than just about any of its competitors and, between their Technology & Media sections, they have some of the best coverage of this sector of any of the broadsheets. Which is why I’m slightly disappointed that they aren’t tying offline & online marketing together.

Last week my colleague James was given a Guardian branded travel-card wallet which included a booklet of vouchers offering money off the cost of The Guardian & The Observer. Knowing that I’m a dedicated Guardian reader, & being a very nice chap, James gave the wallet & vouchers to me. Obviously I was thrilled about this, especially when I noticed the insert which said that I could apply for even more vouchers by going to the URL www.guardianvouchers.co.uk.

When I first saw the URL I groaned, as I assumed that The Guardian had set-up a special microsite for the campaign, which would mean that they weren’t making use of any links that the site acquired. However, when I typed in the URL, I was actually redirected to a page with the main Guardian site. This would be great news, except for the fact that the redirect being used was a temporary 302, instead of the permanent 301 required to pass link equity to the main site.

It would be a very simple job for The Guardian to fix this and if they’d like some guidance, we’d be happy to provide it. Once again though, it shows that even when marketing campaigns are being carried out offline, all of the online implications should be considered. In this case, it’s quite possible that lots of overjoyed Guardian readers will be linking to the vouchers page, and at present their overall SEO won’t benefit.

If you, or anyone at The Guardian, would like some explanation of this issue or any element of search engine optimisation, please do give us a call.

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