What are the downsides and/or challenges to putting page paths (www.example.com/pagepath) on a different server?
-
Hi,
Our company is organized into three different segments and our development team recently needed to switch a portion of the business to subdomain because they wanted to move to a different server platform. We are now seeing the impact of moving this segment of the business to a subdomain on the main domain. SEO is hurting and our MOZ score has dropped significantly.
One fix they are debating is moving everything back to one domain, but place segments of the business on different page paths and hosting specific paths on different servers. I.e. the main domain could be www.example.com hosted in one location and then www.example.com/segment1 would be hosted on a different server. They are hoping to accomplish this using some sort of proxy/caching redirection solution.
The goal of this change would be to recapture our domain strength.
Is this something that is a good option or no? If not, what are the challenges and issues you see arising from doing something like that as I don't know of any other site set up like this.
Thanks in advance.
-
This is actually more common than you might think, though you probably don't even realize it sometimes. I've only seen this with forums, blogs, multi-language/geo sites, etc.. that are hosted with different technologies on different servers (Cart on IIS, Blog on LAMP, etc..) and the SEO/Dev team has agreed this is better than a subdomain path.
The biggest challenge will likely be in ensuring the load times aren't affected, but this can generally be easily overcome by hosting the different servers in the same datacenter, caching elements on the master server, etc..
Cheers,
Jake
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
-
Referring subdirectory pages from 3rd hierarchy level pages. Will this hurts?
Hi all, We have product feature pages at 3rd tier like website.com/product/features. We have the help guides for each of these features on a different subdirectory like website.com/help/guides. We are linking these help guides from every page of features. So, will it hurts us anywhere just because we are encouraging 4th tier pages in website, moreover they are from different sub-directory. Thanks
Web Design | | vtmoz0 -
Https Implementation - Weird Redirection After Putting 's' in http://
Hi Mozers, I have come across some websites with their https version going to a totally different website. For example, http://www.samplesite1.com will load fine but when the protocol is changed to https (https://www.samplesite1.com) it will go to a total different domain say, https://www.samplesite2.com How does this happen, in technical sense? In the warning from browser, it says the the security certificate is from the other website but I would like to understand how this happens and how it impacts SEO. I seem to be not able to understand the relationship of this error and SEO impact. Thanks in advance for your response. Malika
Web Design | | Malika10 -
Moving servers which means moving ip address but using the same URL. Would it harm the website's SEO?
Hello everyone, The server (in-house) which we use to host our website is a bit old. We are using CDN77 for our static content. What if I move all our website to the CDN service? meaning I use their storage capability and just have our url point to the IP address they provide. Would that hurt our rankings?
Web Design | | Edgar-Cerecerez0 -
Is it cloaking/hiding text if textual content is no longer accessible for mobile visitors on responsive webpages?
My company is implementing a responsive design for our website to better serve our mobile customers. However, when I reviewed the wireframes of the work our development company is doing, it became clear to me that, for many of our pages, large parts of the textual content on the page, and most of our sidebar links, would no longer be accessible to a visitor using a mobile device. The content will still be indexable, but hidden from users using media queries. There would be no access point for a user to view much of the content on the page that's making it rank. This is not my understanding of best practices around responsive design. My interpretation of Google's guidelines on responsive design is that all of the content is served to both users and search engines, but displayed in a more accessible way to a user depending on their mobile device. For example, Wikipedia pages have introductory content, but hide most of the detailed info in tabs. All of the information is still there and accessible to a user...but you don't have to scroll through as much to get to what you want. To me, what our development company is proposing fits the definition of cloaking and/or hiding text and links - we'd be making available different content to search engines than users, and it seems to me that there's considerable risk to their interpretation of responsive design. I'm wondering what other people in the Moz community think about this - and whether anyone out there has any experience to share about inaccessable content on responsive webpages, and the SEO impact of this. Thank you!
Web Design | | mmewdell0 -
Schema.org - Right way to mark the pages
Dear all, Almost since we started designing our site, we are using schema microdata. It is not only because of the rich snippets, but because I want the search engines to better understand what we have. For example, the +1 buttom would not work properly without schema microdata, because it kind of ignores the OpenGraph parameters that specified image and description; and since we are a (very small) local bussiness directory (between other things), all our clients have a hand written schema complient description on their lisings, including address, opening ours, telephone number, description, etc. It is hand written by us because the tools avialable are simply not good enough to cover all different scenarios that a listing can present. I have not use, until today, a proper for the homepage, and it is probably the cause that our page lost the nice links below the site description in the google snippet. I did not place it on the body tag, but near the description, closing it inmediately after the description finishs. Now this is solved and we will wait to see if the links come back in the next weeks. Now to the question. Our site has three sections, with three different systems installed, two running wordpress and a third running another script. the main site is the local bussiness directory. The front page is mark as "schema.org/WepPage", and I do not know how to mark the other pages of the main site. I was thinking of marking the listings as "schema.org/ItemPage" since they are related to specific clients. Would you consired it to be right? Then, we have landing pages for the categories, should they be mark as WepPage, or as an Article, or something else? Many thanks in advance for your help, Best Regards, Daniel
Web Design | | te_c0 -
How to verify http://bizdetox.com for google webmaster tools
Hey guys i tried to to make a Preferred Domain choice in webmaster tools, but it is not allowing me to save my choice bec its asking me to verify that i own http://bizdetox.com How do i go about doing that and what are the steps I have already verified www.bizdetox.com
Web Design | | BizDetox0 -
Do iFrames embedded in a page get crawled?
Do iFrames embedded in a page get crawled? I have an iFrame which prints a page hosted by another company embedded in my page. Their links don't include rel=nofollow attributes, so I don't want Google to see them. Do spiders crawl the content in iFrames, or do I have to ensure that the links on this page include the nofollow attribute?
Web Design | | deuce1s0 -
Best Home Page design examples - from a SEO perspective. Could You give me a few?
I am int he process of redesigning a home page and wanted to know from our community if anyone had examples on some great Homepage Designs from an SEO perspective. Things I am looking for : 1. Homepage URL/Design 2. Navitagion 3. Call to action Thank you, much appreciated. The home page I am redesigning is www.gunshotdigital.com Vijay
Web Design | | vijayvasu0