Reverse Proxy better than 301 redirect?
-
Are reverse proxies that much better than 301 redirects? Should I invest the time in doing this? I found out about reverse proxies here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/what-is-a-reverse-proxy-and-how-can-it-help-my-seo
-
Yeah, essentially what I'm doing is moving www.blog.com to www.othersite.com/blog in order to give othersite.com the blog's google juice.
-
I'm mixed on this.
One thing that I think is often missed is that the way subdomains are used vs subfolders. A lot of times when you have a subfolder - it is linked within the internal structure of the site, while subdomains are not. So link juice is not passed. That's why you don't see *.wordpress.com or *.blogger.com sites outranking everything under the sun, none of the root domain juice is passed down to the subdomain.
However, we've seen for our clients that subdomains still work as long as it's part of the internal link structure - with the added benefit of having 2-4 serp results (mostly with branding type queries).
So with that said, reverse proxies are not the necessarily the same as 301 redirects. In general, you would use a reverse proxy if you had content on a remote server and the easiest way to serve that content is using a subdomain - by using a reverse proxy you can instead use a subfolder instead. While a 301 redirect, is generally used to redirect a page to a newer/canonical page.
However, if you're talking about the best solution to handle subdomains - 301 vs reverse proxy. You may end up doing both if you're using a reverse proxy, you may have to 301 redirect certain content pieces... especially if you're proxy doesn't properly redirect/handle relative paths. The issue is talked about in the comment section.
If you're starting a completely new site - my guess would be that a reverse proxy would be better than a 301. As a reverse proxy would not lose any link juice - in theory.
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
-
301 redirects Ruby on Rails
Can anyone point me to the best way to implement 301 redirects on a Ruby on Rails website?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brianvest0 -
Several 301 Redirects to Same Page
Hi, I have 3 Pages we won't use anymore in our website. Let's call them url A, url B and url C. To keep their SEO strength on our domain, I've though about redirecting all of them to url D. For what I understand, when 301 redirecting, about 85-90% of the link SEO juice is passed. Then, if I redirect 3 URLs to the same page... does url D receive all the link SEO juices for URLs added up? (approximately)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | viatrading1
e.g. future url D juice = 100% current url D juice + 85% url A juice + 85% url B juice + 85% url C juice Is this the best practice, or is there a better way? Cheers,0 -
Can I undo 301 redirects to purchase site
A website I am thinking of buying has 301 redirected all pages on his site to one page that explains the site is closing down. If I tell him to change the 301 to 302s will I be able to recover the old pages on the site and keep the authority, rankings and link power of the old pages and not the "Closing page"? Is all i have to do is undo the 301 redirects and everything will go back to how the site was before the 301s were in place? Or will I lose all the link power on individual pages because they already transferred to the "Closing page"? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | atomiconline0 -
Blog tags are creating excessive duplicate content...should we use rel canonicals or 301 redirects?
We are having an issue with our cilent's blog creating excessive duplicate content via blog tags. The duplicate webpages from tags offer absolutely no value (we can't even see the tag). Should we just 301 redirect the tagged page or use a rel canonical?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VanguardCommunications0 -
What to do about old urls that don't logically 301 redirect to current site?
Mozzers, I have changed my site url structure several times. As a result, I now have a lot of old URLs that don't really logically redirect to anything in the current site. I started out 404-ing them, but it seemed like Google was penalizing my crawl rate AND it wasn't removing them from the index after being crawled several times. There are way too many (>100k) to use the URL removal tool even at a directory level. So instead I took some advice and changed them to 200, but with a "noindex" meta tag and set them to not render any content. I get less errors but I now have a lot of pages that do this. Should I (a) just 404 them and wait for Google to remove (b) keep the 200, noindex or (c) are there other things I can do? 410 maybe? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jcgoodrich0 -
301 Redirect from ASP.NET to PHP...Is it possible?
Hi all, I'm trying to migrate my current website over to wordpress however my current website is ASP.NET and obviously Wordpress uses PHP. Is it possible to perform a 301 redirect from a asp.net to a php? Or do you need to convert the asp.net language into php? Or something different? I welcome your thoughts? Regards, Thomas Rochford
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CoGri0 -
301 Redirect Dilemma - Website redesign
Hi Guys, We are redesigning a clients ecommerce site. As part of the process, we're changing the URL structure to make it more friendly. I have put together a provisional 301 redirect plan but I'm not sure just how far I need to go with it. So far I have extract all the pages from the existing site that Google Webmaster Tools says have links pointing at them - this totals 93 pages. I have matched each page like for like to the new website structure. My next step was to pull the landing pages report from Google Analytics, I have extracted the pages that received entrances over the last 6 weeks. This totals 553, less the redirects I have already done and cleaning up some Google Translate pages I have circa 410 pages left. Many of these pages has more than 1 URL pointing to that page. I'm debating how important it is that that all of these remaining 410 pages have individual redirects set up for them one by one. I have to rule out regex because there is no pattern that makes sense given that I have already set up redirects for the first 93 pages that have external links. My question therefore is how important are 301 redirects on pages that have no external links and receive less than 10 entrances over a 6 week previous period? Do I need to 301 every single product on the old site to it's corresponding page on the new site? Also, I'm not sure how to treat pages that have mutliple URL's on the old site, the existing URL structure is such a mess that in some instances I have 5 URL's for one product page? I could feasibly create 5 seperate redirects but is this necessary? Also what about speed considerations, the server is going to have to load these redirects and it may slow the site down. I'm sitting at 100 odd so far. Any answers are most appreciated. Thanks Derek.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pulseo0 -
How important is having a 301 redirect?
Is having a 301 redirect a must for rankings when it comes to the www and non-www version of a site? I am on the bottom of page 1 for my main key phrases but I can't do a 301 redirect with my web host that I've been with for over a year. I've been considering changing web host (currently with Yahoo) but I also have concerns about transferring the site and the impact it might have because of the changing ip address. So my options are Stay Put Change Web host Which would you recommend?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bronxpad0