CNAME redirect for Press Releases

[ryanwats]

Our company is moving our press release section over to Business Wire.  Business Wire will be hosting the press releases on their servers http//ourcompany.newshq.businesswire.com, but we want it to display as if these are hosted on our site www.ourcompany/press-releases/.  This is where our press releases are hosted now.  They are recommending using a CNAME redirect to essentially mask their URL and display ours.

We don't want to lose out on the search value that our press release area has built up over time.  Will the CNAME redirect cause any SEO problems?

[EGOL]

CNAME is a DNS trick.   It isn't a redirect.

Lots of hosted shopping carts use CNAME records to make it look like your customers are checking out on your own domain instead of checking out on something like ultracart.com.

The destination of the move is usually a subdomain such as secure.egol.com.

If you are going to do this you need to have someone who really understands how these things work to confirm that the set-up that these folks suggest is going to work property for SEO.

I don't know enough about it to advise but I do know enough about to say that it probably isn't as simple as you describe.

I am betting that this results in an SEO inefficiency.   If I wanted the press releases to look like they are on my server I would just put future releases on my server unless the PR site has some powerful reason to keep them on their server and redirect to mine.

[MRCSearch]

Using CNAME for this practice is pretty commonplace. That is, provided your DNS setup isn't going to generate a lot of lag.

EDIT: Of course now that I'm Googling around on this, there appears to be a mixed bag of reasoning. I could swear that I've seen it used several times with no negative SEO implications.

Given that you're using CNAME to maintain a URL rather than move to a new one, I still think you're in the clear, though.