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.
Using a Reverse Proxy and 301 redirect to appear Sub Domain as Sub Directory - what are the SEO Risks?
-
We’re in process to move WordPress blog URLs from subdomains to sub-directory. We aren’t moving blog physically, but using reverse proxy and 301 redirection to do this.
- Blog subdomain URL is https://blog.example.com/ and
- destination sub-directory URL is https://www.example.com/blog/
Our main website is e-commerce marketplace which is YMYL site. This is on Windows server. Due to technical reasons, we can’t physically move our WordPress blog to the main website.
Following is our Technical Setup
- Setup a reverse proxy at https://www.example.com/blog/ pointing to https://blog.example.com/
- Use a 301 redirection from https://blog.example.com/ to https://www.example.com/blog/ with an exception if a traffic is coming from main WWW domain then it won’t redirect. Thus, we can eliminate infinite loop.
- Change all absolute URLs to relative URLs on blog
- Change the sitemap URL from https://blog.example.com/sitemap.xml to https://www.example.com/blog/sitemap.xml and update all URLs mentioned within the sitemap.
SEO Risk Evaluation
We have individual GA Tracking ID and individual Google Search Console Properties for main website and blog. We will not merge them. Keep them separate as they are.
Keeping this in mind, I am evaluating SEO Risks factors
- Right now when we receive traffic from main website to blog (or vice versa) then it is considered as referral traffic and new cookies are set for Google Analytics. What’s going to happen when its on the same domain?
- Which type of settings change should I do in Blog’s Google Search Console? (A). Do I need to request “Change of Address” in the Blog’s search console property? (B). Should I re-submit the sitemap?
- Do I need to re-submit the blog sitemap from the https://www.example.com/ Google Search Console Property?
- Main website is e-commerce marketplace which is YMYL website, and blog is all about content. So does that impact SEO?
- Will this dilute SEO link juice or impact on the main website ranking because following are the key SEO Metrices. (A). Main website’s Avg Session Duration is about 10 minutes and bounce rate is around 30% (B). Blog’s Avg Session Duration is 33 seconds and bounce rate is over 92%
-
I wrote this on my phone and I will update this in 2-3 hours
rewrite the URLs do not redirect
-
PS
tools like CloudFlare & Fastly don’t care what you’re server is .
https://blog.cloudflare.com/subdomains-vs-subdirectories-best-practices-workers-part-1/
https://blog.cloudflare.com/subdomains-vs-subdirectories-improved-seo-part-2/
https://moz.com/community/q/reverse-proxy-a-successful-blog-from-subdomain-to-subfolder
frontend ssl_in
bind :443 ssl crt /etc/haproxy/website.com.combined
acl root path /
acl blog path_beg /blog
acl sitedomain path_beg /leasopedia
acl glossary path_beg /glossary
acl wpadmin path_beg /wp-
acl blog_search query -m reg ^s=.$
acl blog_preview query -m reg ^p=.*$use_backend wpengine if blog OR sitedomain OR glossary OR wpadmin OR root blog_search OR root blog_preview
default_backend main-sitebackend wpengine
server wpengine examplecompany.wpengine.com:443 ssl ca-file /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crtbackend main-site
server main-site example.examplecompany.com.:443 ssl ca-file /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crthttps://blog.examplecompany.com or https://examplecompany.com/blog.
It’s worth noting that WPEngine does not recommend this practice.
For those that want to host at https://site.com/blog and do it with a managed WordPress hosting provider like WPEngine, this article is for you.
(Note, WPEngine will automatically block your reverse proxy, so you will need to contact customer support and ask them to whitelist its IP address in their firewall. I found this to be a painless process thanks to the friendly support staff at WPEngine.)
How?
The trick to getting the blog to look like it’s living on the main site (but actually living elsewhere) is to use a reverse proxy.
HAProxy is a powerful reverse proxy, though its configuration has a bit of a learning curve compared to Nginx or Apache.
We use HAProxy internally because it works well with AWS Elastic Load Balancers, which frequently change their IP address. Learn more
HAProxy config
| 1 | bind *:443ssl crt/etc/haproxy/website.com.combined |
You’ll need to use SSL, as all WPEngine installs redirect to SSL.
Of note is that HAProxy expects your certificate chain and your private key to be combined into one file
| 1 | acl |
These are the pattern matching lines that we’ll use to determine which traffic is forwarded to WPEngine
| 1 |
use_backend wpengine ifblog orsitename ORglossary ORwpadmin ORroot blog_search ORroot blog_preview
|
This directs /blog*, /sitename*, /glossary* and /wp-* to WPEngine.
You can replace these with your own blog and page paths configured in wordpress.
This line also directs /?s= and /?p= to wordpress using the combined root and blog_search and blog_preview lines.
These are necessary to making searching and page previews work in WordPress.
| 1 | default_backend main-site |
Everything that doesn’t match one of the above patterns will go to the main site.
| 1 | backend wpengine |
Directives in the frontend that resolve to this backed will route to the blog.
| 1 | backend main-site |
Directives in the frontend that resolve to this backed will route to your main site.
I would use Fastly
https://thoughtbot.com/blog/host-your-blog-under-blog-on-your-www-domain
https://blog.cloudflare.com/subdomains-vs-subdirectories-best-practices-workers-part-1/
-
Hi I have done this for 20+ websites.
Following is our Technical Setup
- Setup a reverse proxy at https://www.example.com/blog/ pointing to https://blog.example.com/
please remember that the hosting or reverse proxy on the server is so important. Some managed WordPress hosts do this better then others.
https://pressidium.com/ now offers reverse proxy's on all plans for free
if you want to do this with out having to worry about it any problem I cannot stress how easy it is done by hosting the blog on Pagely.com it’s now free!
(don’t worry about the $200 they don’t change it)
https://support.pagely.com/hc/en-us/articles/213148558-Reverse-Proxy-Setup
or kinsta for $50 more a month
https://kinsta.com/knowledgebase/reverse-proxy/
Pantheo.io (my go to host) now offers the “Advanced Global CDN” it lets you run a reverse proxy & much more via Fastly (my favorite CDN) the cost is very reasonable.
https://pantheon.io/product/advanced-global-cdn
Servebolt.com offers reverse proxy & hosts all PHP sites Wordpress too. They use CloudFlare & they will setup everything for you for free. They are also a full enterprise partner
https://servebolt.com/help/article/cloudflare-workers-reverse-proxy/
You can also use Fastly, CloudFlare business, Incapsula, Cloudfront
2. Use a 301 redirection from https://blog.example.com/ to https://www.example.com/blog/ with an exception if a traffic is coming from main WWW domain then it won’t redirect. Thus, we can eliminate infinite loop.
This is something that is very easy I would use Fastly
- Change all absolute URLs to relative URLs on blog
NO don’t do that it will hurt your site & will not help you change the URLs they need to be rewritten not made relative it’s a very bad way of trying to do this and will not help your site.
- Change the sitemap URL from https://blog.example.com/sitemap.xml to https://www.example.com/blog/sitemap.xml and update all URLs mentioned within the sitemap
Our main website is e-commerce marketplace which is YMYL site. This is on Windows server. Due to technical reasons, we can’t physically move our WordPress blog to the main website.
If you’re website site is YMYL I would use Pagely but Linode , AWS can do this to with Fastly or Nginx
https://thoughtbot.com/blog/host-your-blog-under-blog-on-your-www-domain
<code>location /blog/ { proxy_pass https://blog.example.com; proxy_set_header Host $host; proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme; }</code>
<code>please let me know if you need help
Tom</code>
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
-
Getting SEO Juice back after Redirect
Hi, On my website, many product pages were redirected over time to its product category, due to the product being unavailable. I understand with a 301 redirect, the final URL would have lost about 15% of the link juice. However - if after some time (e.g. 2 months, or 1 year) I remove the redirection - is the original page going to have any SEO juice, or did it already lose all of it? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | viatrading10 -
Domain name suffix impact on SEO
Hello there, We are about to launch a new website and were wondering what impact a specific suffix would have from an SEO point of view. We were thinking about going for a domain which ends in .london as oppose to .com We are based in London and sell world wide via our website. We are suggesting www.domain.london as oppose to www.domain.com I would appreciate your views... Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | roberthseo0 -
Is it a problem to use a 301 redirect to a 404 error page, instead of serving directly a 404 page?
We are building URLs dynamically with apache rewrite.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
When we detect that an URL is matching some valid patterns, we serve a script which then may detect that the combination of parameters in the URL does not exist. If this happens we produce a 301 redirect to another URL which serves a 404 error page, So my doubt is the following: Do I have to worry about not serving directly an 404, but redirecting (301) to a 404 page? Will this lead to the erroneous original URL staying longer in the google index than if I would serve directly a 404? Some context. It is a site with about 200.000 web pages and we have currently 90.000 404 errors reported in webmaster tools (even though only 600 detected last month).0 -
301 Redirect of subdomain?
Fellow Mozzers, I'm having a hard time wrapping my brain around a redirect issue and thought it was worth posing the question to the Moz community. I did a search first but couldn't find the exact answer I was looking for. How does a 301 redirect work when you redirect a sub domain example.homepage.com to www.homepage.com but you keep the sub directories of example.homepage.com/page-1 active and are trying to rank them? I'm dealing with a current project where this is happening and this doesn't make sense to me, to redirect the subdomain if you're also trying to rank/create search traffic for pages, sub directories on example.homepage.com. This also get's into the debate of if a sub domain site is viewed as it's own website and therefore has to rank itself. If this is true, it seems like we're kind of killing the authority of the site by redirecting it. Additionally, www.homepage.com has a much stronger link profile than example.homepage.com I hope this makes sense. Any thoughts are appreciated. Thanks for your time.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SMG-Texas0 -
How to 301 redirect old wordpress category?
Hi All, In order to avoid duplication errors we've decided to redirect old categories (merge some categories).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet
In the past we have been very generous with the number of categories we assigned each post. One category needs to be redirected back to blog home (removed completely) while a couple others should be merged. Afterwords we will re-categorize some of the old posts. What is the proper way to do so?
We are not technical, Is there a plugin that can assist? Thanks0 -
How to set up 301 redirect for URL with question mark
I have encountered some issue with 301 redirect and htaccess file. I need to redirect the following url: http://www.domain.com/?specifications=colours/page/3 to: http://www.domain.com/colours The 301 redirect command I wrote in htaccess file is as follow: Redirect 301 /?specifications=colours/page/3 http://www.domain.com/colours And it doesn't work at the moment. What is the correct way to set up 301 redirect here? Your help will be sincerely appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | robotseo0 -
Merging Domains... Sub-domains, Directories or Seperate Sites?
Hello! I am hoping you can help me decide the best path to take here... A little background: I'm moving to a new company that has three old domains (the oldest is 10 years old), which get a lot of traffic from their e-letters. Until recently they have not cared about SEO. So the websites have some structural, coding, URL and other issues. The sites are indexed, but have a problem getting crawled and/or indexed for new content - haven't delved into this yet but am certain I will be able to fix any of these issues. These three domains are PR4, PR4, PR5 and contain hundreds of unique articles. Here's the question... They want to move these three sites **to their main company site (PR4) and create sub domains for each one. ** I am wondering if this is a good idea or not. I have merged sites before (creating categories and/or directories) and the end result is that the ONE big site, is much for effective than TWO smaller, less authoritative sites. But the sub domain idea is something I am unsure about from an SEO perspective. Should we do this with sub domains? Or do you think we should keep the sites separate? How do Panda and Penguin play into this? Thanks in advance for the help! SD P.S. I'm not a huge advocate in using PR as a measurement tool, but since I can't reveal the actual domains, I figured I would list it as a reference point.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | essdee0 -
How To 301 Redirect .html pages
I need to redirect a page/URL that is purely .html to a new location. I don't know how to do this. All the redirects I can find are for server side code pages .php/.aspx etc. From my understanding I can't put a server side redirect in a .html file. I am hosting on a microsoft server, however the new page I am redirecting to is .php. I am running some WordPress (.php) files on the server. I need to make it redirect before the old page loads so visitors don't start reading something that is about to get redirected Can someone please help me?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MyNet0