Using a Colo Load Balancer to serve content
-
So this is a little complicated (at least for me...)
We have a client who is having us rebuild and optimize about 350 pages of their website in our CMS. However, the rest of the website will not be on our CMS. We wanted to build these pages on a sub-domain that is pointed to our IPs so it could remain on our CMS--which the client wants. However, they want the content on a sub-directory. This would be fine but they will not point the main domain to us and for whatever reason this becomes impossible per their Dev team.
They have proposed using a Colo Load Balancer to deliver the content from our system (which will be on the sub domain) to their sub directory.
This seems very sketchy to me. Possible duplicate content? Would this be a sort of URL masking? How would Google see this? Has anyone ever even heard of doing anything like this?
-
Hello Billy,
As you're probably aware, load balancing services are for distributing traffic to more than one server in order to maintain high performance even when traffic levels spike. There is nothing wrong with this from an SEO perspective, as it all happens server-side before the user agent (e.g. Google) ever receives anything. It is a common practice amongst enterprise-level websites.
However, you are right to be concerned about this implementation, as it is definitely not the intended use of the technology, and sounds like a workaround instead of an actual fix. It may be a good workaround if you only allow one version of the content to be indexed, and ensure proper use of cross-domain rel canonical tags. Or you could even simply block anyone, including Google, from accessing the non-canonical version (on your subdomain, I take it) by returning a 401 (unauthorized) or a 403 (forbidden) status code.
-
They're right in that you do NOT want the content to be on a different subdomain--in most cases, Google doesn't share domain authority across subdomains.
You can do a reverse proxy to handle this--see Jeremy's writeup here.
Load-balancing is a fairly generic term. I'm really familiar only with BigIP F5 hardware load balancing and Microsoft's software-based load balancing, but it's possible that some load balancing solutions can handle things like the reverse proxy would.
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
-
Who uses WordPress Tags anymore?
Just curious if people are still using WordPress Tags. I wonder if with the direction Google is going the last couple years, having sites that get bloated with extraneous Tag archives just decreases the quality of the site.
Technical SEO | | WilliamBay2 -
Duplicate Content
Hi, I'm working on a site and I'm having some issues with its structure causing duplicate content. The first issue is that the search pages will show up as duplicates.
Technical SEO | | OOMDODigital
A search for new inventory may be new.aspx
The duplicate may be something like new.aspx=page1, or something like that and so on. The second issue is with inventory. When new inventory gets put into the stock of the store, a new page for that item will be populated with duplicate content. There appears to be no canonical source for that page. How can I fix both of these? Thanks!0 -
Duplicate page content
Hello, My site is being checked for errors by the PRO dashboard thing you get here and some odd duplicate content errors have appeared. Every page has a duplicate because you can see the page and the page/~username so... www.short-hairstyles.com is the same as www.short-hairstyles.com/~wwwshor I don't know if this is a problem or how the crawler found this (i'm sure I have never linked to it). But I'd like to know how to prevent it in case it is a problem if anyone knows please? Ian
Technical SEO | | jwdl0 -
Using video transcripts v captions and avoiding duplicate content?
Part 1: After editing a You Tube transcript, I typically re-upload as a caption file (with time codes)...for SEO does it matter whether you upload as a transcript v. captions? Is one better than the other? Part 2: If you upload a transcript (or caption) to YouTube, then post that video/transcript in your blog, wouldn't you get pinged for duplicate content?
Technical SEO | | vernonmack0 -
How do you properly handle syndicated content?
The same piece of content is pulled in and presented (syndicated) within a frame on different web sites (owned by the same company). However, I would like only one web site to rank on Google's search results for that content. How do I set this up? Thanks, claudia
Technical SEO | | claudmar0 -
Use of Meta Tag - MSSmartTagsPreventParsing
We've inherited some sites from another developer that had the following tag: All references I can find to it are from 2004. What is the purpose and is it worth including in pages/sites we build?
Technical SEO | | wcksmith0 -
Duplicate content
This is just a quickie: On one of my campaigns in SEOmoz I have 151 duplicate page content issues! Ouch! On analysis the site in question has duplicated every URL with "en" e.g http://www.domainname.com/en/Fashion/Mulberry/SpringSummer-2010/ http://www.domainname.com/Fashion/Mulberry/SpringSummer-2010/ Personally my thoughts are that are rel = canonical will sort this issue, but before I ask our dev team to add this, and get various excuses why they can't I wanted to double check i am correct in my thinking? Thanks in advance for your time
Technical SEO | | Yozzer0 -
Using the Canonical Tag
Hi, I have an issue that can be solve with a canonical tag, but I am not sure yet, we are developing a page full of statistics, like this: www.url.com/stats/ But filled with hundreds of stats, so users can come and select only the stats they want to see and share with their friends, so it becomes like a new page with their slected stats: www.url.com/stats/?id=mystats The problems I see on this is: All pages will be have a part of the content from the main page 1) and many of them will be exactly the same, so: duplicate content. My idea was to add the canonical tag of "www.url.com/stats/" to all pages, similar as how Rand does it here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps But I am not sure of this solution because the content is not exactly the same, page 2) will only have a part of the content that page 1) has, and in some cases just a very small part. Is the canonical tag useful in this case? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | andresgmontero0