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://cloudz.click/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
-
If my website uses CDN does thousands of 301 redirect can harm the website performance?
Hi, If my website uses CDN does thousands of 301 redirect can harm the website performance? Thanks Roy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kadut1 -
301 Redirecting from domain to subdomain
We're taking on a redesign of our corporate site on our main domain. We also have a number of well established, product based subdomains. There are a number of content pages that currently live on the corporate site that rank well, and bring in a great deal of traffic, though we are considering placing 301 redirects in place to point that traffic to the appropriate pages on the subdomains. If redirected correctly, can we expect the SEO value of the content pages currently living on the corporate site to transfer to the subdomains, or will we be negatively impacting our SEO by transferring this content from one domain to multiple subdomains?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chris81980 -
Does having a different sub domain for your Landing Page and Blog affect your overall SEO benefits and Ranking?
We have a domain www.spintadigital.com that is hosted with dreamhost and we also have a seperate subdomain blog.spintadigital.com which is hosted in the Ghost platform and we are also using Unbounce landing pages with the sub domain get.spintadigital.com. I wanted to know whether having subdomain like this would affect the traffic metric and ineffect affect the SEO and Rankings of our site. I think it does not affect the increase in domain authority, but in places like similar web i get different traffic metrics for the different domains. As far as i can see in many of the metrics these are considered as seperate websites. We are currently concentrating more on our blogs and wanted to make sure that it does help in the overall domain. We do not have the bandwidth to promote three different websites, and hence need the community's help to understand what is the best option to take this forward.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vinodh-spintadigital0 -
Too many 301 redirects?
Hey, My company currently has one chief website with about 500-600 other domains that all feature the same material as the chief website. These domains have been around for about 5 years and have actually picked up some link traffic. I have all of these identical web-pages utilizing rel=canonical but I was wondering if I would be better served, from SEO purposes, to 301 redirect all of these sites to their respective pages on our chief website? If I add 500 301 redirects, will the major search engines consider this to be black-hat link-building even though the sites are related and technically already feature the same content? For an example, the chief website is www.1099pro.com and I would 301 redirect the below sites to the chief site: 1099softwarepro.com 1099softwarepro.info 1099softwarepro.net 1099softwarepro.biz 1099softwareprofessionals.com 1099softwareprofessionals.info ...you get the point
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Stew2220 -
301 vs 410 redirect: What to use when removing a URL from the website
We are in the process of detemining how to handle URLs that are completely removed from our website? Think of these as listings that have an expiration date (i.e. http://www.noodle.org/test-prep/tphU3/sat-group-course). What is the best practice for removing these listings (assuming not many people are linking to them externally). 301 to a general page (i.e. http://www.noodle.org/search/test-prep) Do nothing and leave them up but remove from the site map (as they are no longer useful from a user perspective) return a 404 or 410?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | abargmann0 -
How to do geo targeting for domain and sub directories in Webmaster tool?
Hello All, How can i do geo targeting in multiple countries on my ** root domain and sub **directories in Webmaster tool. My domain is "abc.com" and i want to target three countries UAE , Kuwait, Saudi arabia. So, Can i assign geo targeting in Webmaster tool , Root domain for UAE country and make other two sub directories for Kuwait and saudi ? abc.com - UAE (geo targeting) abc.com/kw - Kuwait (geo targeting) abc.com/sa - Saudi (geo targeting) Or Root doamain should be not assign for any country and Make three sub directories for UAE, Kuwait , and saudi and targeting them there geo locations. abc.com - Unlisted (geo targeting) abc.com/uae/ - UAE (geo targeting) abc.com/kw/ - Kuwait (geo targeting) abc.com/sa/ - Saudi (geo targeting)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rahul110 -
Changing a parent category and 301 redirecting
I have a set of three pages that are subpages of a parent. The structure is as follows: mysite.com/directory/personal-widgets mysite.com/directory/commercial-widgets mysite.com/directory/widgets-services The partent page name "directory" really isn't working for where I want these pages to evolve. So I want to change it to "guides" In a world without worrying about google, I would simply change the parent page to guides, so they look like this, and be done with it: mysite.com/guides/personal-widgets But, the obvious problem is that I have external links to the page now. And the pages have a nice PR. And they also have Facebook page Likes and I don't know if I'll lose those. I know that if I should do this I should redirect the pages to the new pages of course. My question is: Will redirecting the old URL to the new URL with a 301 cause anything negative to happen that I might not be expecting? Does Google dislike Redirects for any reason, or understand they are sometimes necessary?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bizzer0 -
Are there any negative effects to using a 301 redirect from a page to another internal page?
For example, from http://www.dog.com/toys to http://www.dog.com/chew-toys. In my situation, the main purpose of the 301 redirect is to replace the page with a new internal page that has a better optimized URL. This will be executed across multiple pages (about 20). None of these pages hold any search rankings but do carry a decent amount of page authority.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Visually0