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
-
Impact of Medium blog hosted on my subdomain
I am using the Medium blogging platform to blog, but it is pointed to my site and appears at blog.mysite.com. Since the content is hosted on Medium and pointed to my subdomain via an A Record / CNAME / etc... 1. Will my domain get credit for backlinks to the blog content? 2. If Medium changes in the future and no longer points to my subdomain, will I lose all of the backlinks I've built up?
Technical SEO | | davidevans_seo0 -
Moving from a subdomain to subfolder
Hello, I am currently working on a site that is leveraging multiple subdomains. I wanted to see if it suggested to migrate them into subfolders. One of the subdomains is a .shop and the other is location specific. Thanks, T
Technical SEO | | Tucker_100 -
Why blocking a subfolder dropped indexed pages with 10%?
Hy Guys, maybe you can help me to understand better: on 17.04 I had 7600 pages indexed in google (WMT showing 6113). I have included in the robots.txt file, Disallow: /account/ - which contains the registration page, wishlist, etc. and other stuff since I'm not interested to rank with registration form. on 23.04 I had 6980 pages indexed in google (WMT showing 5985). I understand that this way I'm telling google I don't want that section indexed, by way so manny pages?, Because of the faceted navigation? Cheers
Technical SEO | | catalinmoraru0 -
Small blog needs paid SEO help
I looked at Moz's recommended companies but they are all for huge blogs and websites. I cannot afford those fees. My blog is small but growing and was hit by a Google Panda tweak back in July. My organic traffic disappeared overnight and although I've been working hard to improve my blog, I still get no organic traffic after being on the first page. I would like to pay someone to look at my site and give me help but I cannot pay what these huge companies are asking for. Any advice?
Technical SEO | | blogger20130 -
Changing a blog url from subdomain to subfolder
I am abou to change my company blog from a subdomain (blog.mydomain.com) to a subfolder (mydomain.com/blog), from suggestions from this awesome community! Not only that though, because the current blog is on another server than the main site I have to move my blog between servers as well. This will be a big hassle for me, and means a big risk for errors as I don't have a clue what I am doing on the development part. Hint: I'm no developer. My blog is fairly new, having posted 18 blog posts so far. There is no major linking to or from the blog as it has been basically no activity on the blog. It has been fairly good optimized for SEO, with custom plugin settings for Wordpress SEO plugin and similar. Also followed advice from Rand regarding wordpress SEO. So I guess my question is: Would it be a big loss for me to just start over with a new blog on the subfolder domain? And move content over from the old blog manually (and then deleting the old one). Or would It be plain stupid taking that route? Thankfull for all help I can get!
Technical SEO | | danielpett0 -
Subdomains & CDNs
I've set up a CDN to speed up my domain. I've set up a CNAME to map the subdomain cdn.example.com to the URL where the CDN hosts my static content (images, CSS and JS files, and PDFs). www.example.com and cdn.example.com are now two different IP addresses. Internal links to my PDF files (white papers and articles) used to be www.example.com/downloads but now they are cdn.example.com/downloads The same PDF files can be accessed at both the www and the cdn. subdomain. Thus, external links to the www version will continue to work. Question 1: Should I set up 301 redirects in .htaccess such as: Redirect permanent /downloads/filename.pdf http://cdn.example.com/downloads/filename.pdf Question 2: Do I need to do anything else in my .htaccess file (or anywhere else) to ensure that any SEO benefit provided by the PDF files remains associated with my domain? Question 3: Am I better off keeping my PDF files on the www side and off of the CDN? Thanks, Akira
Technical SEO | | ahirai0 -
Business/Personal Blog Duplicate Content
Quick Question. I am in the process of launching a new website for my IT business which will include a blog. I also want to start up my personal blog again. I want to publish some blog posts to both my business and personal blogs but I don't want to have any duplicate content issues. I am not concerned with building the SERPs of my personal blog but I am very focused on the business blog/site. I am looking for some ideas of how I can publish content to both sites without getting hurt by duplicate content. Again, I am not concerned with building up the placement of my personal site but I do want to have a strong personal site that helps build my name. Any help on this would be great. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | ZiaTG0 -
Moving subdomain ? How to ?
Hi all. I've purchased a domain name two years ago with the idea to offer wide range of services. I've also created a sub-domain providing specific service for highly competitive keyword. Sadly plans went wrong and I didn't use the root domain name at all, just the sub-domain providing that service. There aren't much links to that sub-domain, but all are quality links, until recently I've managed to keep positions between 5 and 7 without any effort, but yesterday I saw that it's dropped to 9. The question is, before I start to build links and write articles to get back up my domain, is it worth to move that sub-domain to my original root domain. As I said, there aren't much links to that sub-domain, it only has pagerank1, also for the last year the original root domain was redirected (301) to the sub-domain to not loose traffic and I'm scared if I reverse this procedure and redirect my sub-domain to the root domain that Google will get confused. It's a tricky question I know 🙂
Technical SEO | | VasilTasev0