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.
One domain - Multiple servers
-
Can I have the root domain pointing to one server and other URLs on the domain pointing to another server without redirecting, domain masking or HTML masking?
Dealing with an old site that is a mess. I want to avoid migrating the old website to the new environment. I want to work on a page by page and section by section basis, and whatever gets ready to go live I will release on the new server while keeping all other pages untouched and live on the old server.
What are your recommendations?
-
You can find more details about how a reverse proxy works here. Regarding the setup, unfortunately that's outside of my wheelhouse - we had to rely on the tech support team to help out with that.
-
Thanks!
Can you please explain in more detail how this is set up and what it is?
Would that affect the SEO in any way?
-
Hey there,
Sounds like you need a reverse proxy. I recently had a client that was going to migrate small portions of their site over a few months, and this is what we ended up recommending. The situation was this (sounds similar to yours): The client was moving a site with about 1,800 pages from one development firm to another, each with their own proprietary CMS and hosting services. The reverse proxy was essentially a connection between the 2 servers. A URL was requested on server 1, the original developer, the reverse proxy mapped that URL to content on server 2, the new developer. The result was the URLs from server 1 stayed the same, but the content came from server 2 for any URL that had been mapped in the reverse proxy.
NOW FOR A WORD OF CAUTION: This reverse proxy worked great, until security settings on one of the servers prevented requests from coming through, which resulted in dead URLs. So if you're going to move forward with this, be sure that your servers will play nice with each other and not block requests from the other.
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
-
Cleaning up a Spammy Domain VS Starting Fresh with a New Domain
Hi- Can you give me your opinion please... if you look at murrayroofing.com and see the high SPAM score- and the fact that our domain has been put on some spammy sites over the years- Is it better and faster to place higher in google SERP if we create a fresh new domain? My theory is we will spin our wheels trying to get unlisted from alot of those spammy linking sites. And that it would be faster to see results using a fresh new domain rather than trying to clean up the current spammy doamin. Thanks in advance - You guys have been awesome!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | murraycustomhomescom0 -
One of my Friend's website Domain Authority is Reducing? What could be the reason?
Hello Guys, One of my friend's website domain authority is decreasing since they have moved their domain from HTTP to https.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Max_
There is another problem that his blog is on subfolder with HTTP.
So, can you guys please tell me how to fix this issue and also it's losing some of the rankings like 2-5 positions down. Here is website URL: myfitfuel.in/
here is the blog URL: myfitfuel.in/mffblog/0 -
Using pictures from another domain
We are building several sites for several clients which will be using images from the manufacturer. Our dev team wants to insert the manufacturer's url for the images, instead of actually downloading the image and hosting on our server. There are thousands of images, so downloading images to our server will be time consuming, so we are looking for a shortcut.... however I'm concerned this will cause other issues. Is using manufactueresdomain.com/12345.jpg going to cause SEO issues? will this generate Google penalties? Since we are not able to control the image file name, we cannot optimize it. We will add Alt text and Title tag for each image, but the file name is random characters. How important is the file name for SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Branden_S0 -
Buying a domain banned by google
Hi , I came across a super domain for my business but found out that it was a great domain with 100s of link backs but is now banned by Google search engine meaning Google does not index content from that domain. Since the domains linkbacks are from my domin does it make sense to but that domain and redirect those link backs to another (301) and hope that the new domain gets some juice ... I know it is sounding crazy and may not be the best thing to do ethically but still wanted to check if its possible to get some juice.. Rgds Avinash
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Avinashmb0 -
Is it safe to redirect our .nl (netherlands) domain that we have just purchased to our .com domain?
Hi all! We've recently developed a German version of our website with German translation and now we have just purchased a .nl domain, but with this one, we want all of the copy to remain in English. Is it ok to redirect our .nl domain to our current .com website or will this give us bad SEO points? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | donaldsze0 -
Redirect ruined domain to new domain without passing link juice
A new client has a domain which has been hammered by bad links, updates etc and it's basically on its arse because of previous SEO guys. They have various domains for their business (brand.com, brand.co.uk) and want to use a fresh domain and take it from there. Their current domain is brand.com (the ruined one). They're not bothered about the rankings for brand.com but they want to redirect brand.com to brand.co.uk so that previous clients can find them easily. Would a 302 redirect work for this? I don't want to set up a 301 redirect as I don't want any of the crappy links pointing across. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jasonwdexter0 -
Multiple Authors Google + Authorship
Hello, I took a look through past questions but can't seem to find a definitive answer on setting up Google + Authorship credit (for multiple authors) using a Wordpress blog. Has anyone had experience setting this up? Or could you recommend solid reading/research? I took a look at a couple of Wordpress plug in's but just found them very confusing (so did our IT contact who will ultimately be setting up code for this.) Any direction or advice is appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOSponge0 -
Recovery during domain migration
On average, how long does it takes to recover 80% of the rankings if two high authority domains are combined without chaging any content? I totally understand that each domain is different and search engines can treat them differently but if all the steps are followed to the T what are the chances?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ninjamarketer1