Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Reverse proxy a successful blog from subdomain to subfolder?
-
I have an ecommerce site that we'll call confusedseo.com. I created a WordPress blog and CNAME'd it to blog.confusedseo.com. Since then, the blog has earned a PageRank of 3 and a decent amount of organic traffic.
I am considering a reverse proxy to forward blog.confusedseo.com to confusedseo.com/blog/. As I understand it, this will greatly help the "link juice" of the root domain. However, I'm concerned about any potential harm done to the existing SEO value of the blog. What, if anything, should I be doing to ensure that the reverse proxy doesn't hurt my "juice" rather than help it?
-
Hey, I have a question in this:
We have setup a seperate Google Analytics ID and Google Search Console Property for the sub-domain and then if we are using reverse proxy to keep it under sub-directory.
So what happens to the GA tracking and Google Search Console in this case?
You can read my full question here:
-
Hi there,
Im investigating the same reverse proxy solution for my eCommerce blog. was your implementation successful?
-
Canonical will pass link juice almost exactly like 301s will, so there's no harm in going that route. Matt Cutts explains that in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zW5UL3lzBOA
You sound like you're good to go. You've got duplicate content worked out, and you've got a plan to retain link juice (canonical).
-
Since the subdomain does still exist live, someone doing a reverse proxy would need to take some steps to mitigate duplicate content issues. The first would be to set up the new permalinks and rel canonical tags via Wordpress and Yoast's SEO plugin (which rocks, btw). Then you would need to do the robots.txt/GWT steps that you quoted. If there's anything else that needs doing, I am definitely all ears before I attempt this.
-
Ah! I misunderstood the bit about reverse proxying. In that case... to be perfectly honest, I'm not sure.
When you setup a reverse proxy, what happens to the sub-domain? Does it go away or does it still exist live? If it remains live, you'd end up with a duplicate content issue.
EDIT >> I found this at the source you linked to (which answers my question) -->
"The next thing you can do is add a robots.txt file to the sub-domain that stops robots from indexing it. As Reverse Proxying keeps the requested URL the /blog/ URLs will use the robots.txt from the main domain rather than the sub-domain.
The final (and most extreme) thing you can do is to register Google Webmaster Tools for the sub-domain and remove it from the index. If you are doing this, you need to do it in conjunction with robots.txt."
-
Thanks for your response, Philip. My research indicates that a 301 redirect on a location that is being reverse proxied would result in an infinite loop. (source) I haven't tested it to confirm, though. Is that true?
-
You need to setup 301 redirects for ALL of the pages and posts on the blog sub-domain to their new locations in the sub-folder. This is very important. Without the proper redirects in place, you will lose all value from links pointing to the blog sub-domain, plus all the history, authority, and rankings that the pages have earned.
As for your reasoning to move it from a sub-domain to a sub-folder, I'm not sure you'll receive any sort of link juice boost on your root domain from doing this. Maybe someone else can prove me wrong/correct me...
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Delete old blog posts after 301 redirects to new pages?
Hi Moz Community, I've recently created several new pages on my site using much of the same copy from blog posts on the same topics (we did this for design flexibility and a few other reasons). The blogs and pages aren't exactly identical, as the new pages have much more content, but I don't think there's a point to having both and I don't want to have duplicate content, so we've used 301 redirects from the old blog posts to the new pages of the same topic. My question is: can I go ahead and delete the old blog posts? (Or would there be any reasons I shouldn't delete them?) I'm guessing with the 301 redirects, all will be well in the world and I can just delete the old posts, but I wanted to triple check to make sure. Thanks so much for your feedback, I really appreciate it!
Technical SEO | | TaraLP1 -
How do I complete a reverse DNS check when completing log file analysis?
I'm doing some log file analysis and need to run a reverse DNS check to ensure that I'm analysing logs from Google and not any imposters. Is there a command I can use in terminal to do this? If not, whats the best way to verify Googlebot? Thanks
Technical SEO | | daniel-brooks0 -
Does using a reverse proxy to make a subdomain appear as a subdirectory affect SEO?
Using a reverse proxy only makes it appear that a subdomain is really a subfolder. However, links in the end remain the same. Does this have any negative (or positive) impact on SEO? Does it make it difficult from the blog's (subdomain's) sitemap or robots.txt file to be properly read by search engines?
Technical SEO | | rodelmo41 -
Removing site subdomains from Google search
Hi everyone, I hope you are having a good week? My website has several subdomains that I had shut down some time back and pages on these subdomains are still appearing in the Google search result pages. I want all the URLs from these subdomains to stop appearing in the Google search result pages and I was hoping to see if anyone can help me with this. The subdomains are no longer under my control as I don't have web hosting for these sites (so these subdomain sites just show a default hosting server page). Because of this, I cannot verify these in search console and submit a url/site removal request to Google. In total, there are about 70 pages from these subdomains showing up in Google at the moment and I'm concerned in case these pages have any negative impacts on my SEO. Thanks for taking the time to read my post.
Technical SEO | | QuantumWeb620 -
Migrating to new subdomain with new site and new content.
Our marketing department has decided that a new site with new content is needed to launch new products and support our existing ones. We cannot use the same subdomain(www = old subdomain and ww1 = new subdomain)as there is a technically clash between the windows server currently used, and the lamp stack required to run the new wordpress based CMS and site. We also have an aging piece of SAAS software on the www domain which is makes moving it to it's own subdomain far too risky. 301's have been floated as a way of managing the transition. I'm not too keen on that idea due to the double effect of new subdomain and content, and the SEO impact it might have. I've suggested uploading the new site to the new subdomain while leaving the old site in place. Then gradually migrating sections over before turning parts of the old site off and using a 301 at that point to finalise the move. The old site would inform user's there is a new version and it would then convert them to the new site(along with a cookie to auto redirect them in future.) while still leaving the old content in place for existing search traffic, bookmarks and visitors via static URLs. Before turning off sections on the old site we would create rel canonicals to redirect to the new pages based on a a mapped set of URLs(this in itself concerns me as the rel canonical is essentially linking to different content). Would be grateful for any advice on whether this strategy is flawed or whether another strategy might be more suitable?
Technical SEO | | Rezza0 -
Are subdomains a good seo strategy for a multistore e-commerce?
Hi there I'm wondering what is the best strategy to work with multi-stores on magento: to use or not to use subdomains? Suppose we have the www.website.com and we configure it to use multistore. The url base will not have the store id on it so it will not be like www.website.com/store1 and www.website.com/store2. It will simply rely on the user session so if we have two categories for each store it will acces using: www.website.com/category1 (for store 1) www.website.com/category2 (for store 2) The homepage will allways be set on www.website.com so we should have a single page for several "home pages" (depending on the user session / store he is accessing). I guess this is not a good option if we want to rank for different keywords (for each store). So I was wondering if it is a good solution to set: store1.website.com store2.website.com This way we have 2 "home pages" each one able to rank. Does it make sense? Is it good or bad for seo? Another option I was considering was: www.website.com (for store 1) store2.website.com (for store 2) store3.website.com (for store 3) www.website.com/blog (for blog) Can this work? Good or bad for seo? best regards
Technical SEO | | qgairsoft0 -
Simple 301 redirect a subfolder to another subfolder
Hi, I have a number of sub-folders that I have to move, each of which contains a number of files. subfolder A has files a, b & c subfolder B has files d, e & f
Technical SEO | | aactive
subfolder C has files g, h & i A, B & C folders need to be X, Y & Z Will the following work? RewriteRule ^subfolder-A/* http://www.domain.com/subfolder-X/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^subfolder-B/* http://www.domain.com/subfolder-Y/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^subfolder-C/* http://www.domain.com/subfolder-Z/ [R=301,L] will this result in visitors to http://www.domain.com/subfolder-B/f.html being redirected to http://www.domain.com/subfolder-Y/f.html? All on the same domain. in reality we are talking hundreds of sub folders and thousands of files so we don't want to have to reference every file individually in the htaccess. Thanks0 -
Keep the blog separate or incorporate into main domain?
So my organization currently has both a main site and on a separate domain and separate host a wordpress blog. (our own domain not a wordpress.com) the content posted on this blog is local, community driven, and related to our business but it is not used in anyway as a "sales" tool. It's more for interaction purposes with members and employees. This blog has a lot of content and is updated with new posts very often. (generate traffic from a pretty wide variety of searches some related some not) My plan has been to 301 the old domain and move the wordpress blog over to our root domain in a subdirectory such as oursite.com/blog. Does anyone have tips for moving a blog over like this? I'm concerned about any link juice it has dropping off and since it does provide some links to our root site currently (since it's basically a separate site). Basically i'm wondering if it'll be worth the effort or if i should just keep it separate and focus on other content gen strategies.
Technical SEO | | SCFederal0