Will I lose Link Juice when implementing a Reverse Proxy?

[jacob.young.cricut]

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:

• shop.example.com
• blog.example.com
• uk.example.com
• us.example.com

After the reverse proxy they'll look like this:

• example.com/uk/
• example.com/us/
• example.com/us/shop
• example.com/us/blog

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:

1. Is a reverse proxy equal to or worse/better than a 301?
2. Should I combine reverse proxy with a 301 or rel canonical tag?
3. When implementing a reverse proxy will I lose link juice = ranking?

Thanks so much!

Jacob

[Everett]

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.

[jacob.young.cricut]

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

[jacob.young.cricut]

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

[Everett]

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.

[jacob.young.cricut]

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?

[ClaytonJ]

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.