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.
Will I lose Link Juice when implementing a Reverse Proxy?
-
My company is looking at consolidating 5 websites that it has running on magento, wordpress, drupal and a few other platforms on to the same domain. Currently they're all on subdomains but we'd like to consolidate the subdomains to folders for UX and SEO potential.
Currently they look like this:
After the reverse proxy they'll look like this:
I'm curious to know how much link juice will be lost in this switch. I've read a lot about site migration (especially the Moz example). A lot of these guides/case studies just mention using a bunch of 301's but it seems they'd probably be using reveres proxies as well.
My questions are:
- Is a reverse proxy equal to or worse/better than a 301?
- Should I combine reverse proxy with a 301 or rel canonical tag?
- When implementing a reverse proxy will I lose link juice = ranking?
Thanks so much!
Jacob
-
Two servers? The existing one to process the redirects and a new one to handle the reverse proxy. Or vice versa. So the DNS for the old domain would point to a server that does the redirects. However, the server that hosts the site will be set to reverse proxy.
Another way of looking at this concept would be to take down and redirect the old site, and to start a new site, with the exact same files/database, that will be used to serve the content in the subdirectory/folder.
Ask what they think of that idea. I certainly don't have all the answers to every situations, but will do my best to help you find a workable solution.
-
Hey Everett,
My dev team says it's extremely difficult to do a 301 with the reverse proxy because the reverse proxy needs the domain in order to create the reverse proxy. If we place a 301 redirect it won't be able to access the domain and will be broken.
We're unable to do a server to server process because we're using load balance applications. Do you have any recommendations with this situation?
Thanks,
Jacob
-
That's good to know. I'll follow that.
Some of the articles I read made it sound like reverse proxy was another form of 301, but it didn't make sense. Now I know why.
Cheers,
Jacob
-
You need to do both.
The reverse proxy isn't about SEO so much as the ability to use subdirectories instead of subdomains, even though the subdirectories are hosted on different servers. You have to use a reverse proxy for the technological requirements of using a subdirectory (folder) instead of a subdomain when you're hosting sites on different servers but want to combine them on the same domain.
The 301 Redirects will ensure the users (including search engines) that visit the old URL on the subdomain get forwarded on to the new URL in the subdirectory. This is what preserves pagerank, and provides a good user experience. Do not keep the content available at the old URLs; Do not allow those URLs to return a 404 Status. 301 Redirect them.
I hope that clarifies your situation.
-
My dev team would prefer a reverse proxy. Is there a reason you'd rather do a 301 than a reverse proxy?
When reading this article https://moz.com/blog/what-is-a-reverse-proxy-and-how-can-it-help-my-seo it seemed that doing a reverse proxy would be preferable to just a bunch of 301's. Is that not the case?
-
It is getting over complicated. First principal is do not harm. I would not recommend a reverse proxy. 301'ing each page carry's the juice over. A 301 does everything you need.
However prior to any 301's I would be auditing each sub domain for a penalty - ie you could be pushing a penalty to the main site. So i would suggest a very thorough audit. If in doubt rel canonical that page.
Hope that assists.
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
-
Internal links to landing pages
Hi, we are in the process of building a new website and we have 12 different locations and for theses 12 locations we have landing pages with unique copy on the following: 1. Marketing...2 SEO....3. PPC....4. Web Design Therefor there are 48 landing pages. The marketing pages are the most important ones to us in terms of traffic and priority. My question is: 1. Should we put a dropdown of the are pages in the main header under locations that link to the area marketing pages? 2. What is the best way to link all the sub pages such as London Web Design? Should these links just be coming off the London marketing page? or should we have a sitemap in the footer that lists every page? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Caffeine_Marketing0 -
Passing link juice via javascript?
Hello Client got website with javascript generated content. All links there (from mainpage to some deeper page) are js generated. In code there're only javascripts and other basic typical code but no text links (<a href...="" ).<="" p=""></a> <a href...="" ).<="" p="">The question is: are those js links got the same "seo power" as typical html href links?.For example majestic.com can't scan website properly and can't show seo metrics for pages. I know google crawls them (links and pages) but are they as good as typical links?</a> <a href...="" ).<="" p="">Regards,</a>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PenaltyHammer0 -
Sponsored blog - pass any link juice?
Hello there, If a quality blog in our specific niche writes an article about us which is clearly labelled "sponsored post" as we have either paid them or given them a product, will Google discount that link going back to our website? Should we request for the link to be "no-follow"? Thanks Robert
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | roberthseo0 -
Will a disclaimer affect Crawling?
Hello everyone! My German users will have to get a disclaimer according to German laws, now my question is the following: Will a disclaimer affect crawling? What's the best practice to have regarding this? Should I have special care in this? What's the best disclaimer technique? A Plain HTML page? Something overlapping the site? Thank you all!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NelsonF0 -
Site wide footer links vs. single link for websites we design
I’ve been running a web design business for the past 5 years, 90% or more of the websites we build have a “web design by” link in the footer which links back to us using just our brand name or the full “web design by brand name” anchor text. I’m fully aware that site-wide footer links arent doing me much good in terms of SEO, but what Im curious to know is could they be hurting me? More specifically I’m wondering if I should do anything about the existing links or change my ways for all new projects, currently we’re still rolling them out with the site-wide footer links. I know that all other things being equal (1 link from 10 domains > 10 links from 1 domain) but is (1 link from 10 domains > 100 links from 10 domains)? I’ve got a lot of branded anchor text, which balances out my exact match and partial match keyword anchors from other link building nicely. Another thing to consider is that we host many of our clients which means there are quite a few on the same server with a shared IP. Should I? 1.) Go back into as many of the sites as I can and remove the link from all pages except the home page or a decent PA sub page- keeping a single link from the domain. 2.) Leave all the old stuff alone but start using the single link method on new sites. 3.) Scratch the site credit and just insert an exact-match anchor link in the body of the home page and hide with with CSS like my top competitor seems to be doing quite successfully. (kidding of course.... but my competitor really is doing this.)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nbeske0 -
100 + links on a scrolling page
Can you add more than 100 links on your webpage If you have a webpage that adds more content from a database as a visitor scrolls down the page. If you look at the page source the 100 + links do not show up, only the first 20 links. As you scroll down it adds more content and links to the bottom of the page so its a continuos flowing page if you keep scrolling down. Just wanted to know how the 100 links maximum fits into this scenario ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jlane90 -
Removed Site-wide links
Hi there, I have recently removed quite a lot of site-wide links leaving the only link on homepage's of some websites, since doing this I have seen a dramatic drop on my keywords, going from position 2-3 to nowhere. Has anyone else experienced anything like this, should I expect to see a return on these keywords? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Link Age as SEO factor?
Hi Guys
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VividLime
I have a client who ranks well within a competitive sector of the travel industry. They are planning CMS move which will involve changing from .cfm to .aspx We will be doing the standard redirects etc However Matt's statement here on 301 redirects got me thinking
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zW5UL3lzBOA&t=0m24s He says that basically you loose a bit of page rank when you do a 301 redirect. Now, we will be potentially redirecting 1000s of links and my thinking is 'a lot of a little, adds up to a lot' In other words, 1000s of redirects may have a big enough impact to loose some rankings in a very competitive and aggressive space. So recommended that we contact the sites who has the link highest value and ask them to manually change the links from cfm to aspx. This will then mean that there are no loss value as with a 301 redirect. -But now I have another dilemma which I'm unsure about. So the main question:
Is link age factor in rankings ? If I update any links, this will make said link new to Google, so if link age is a factor, would this also lessen the value passed initially?0