Is there a way to host my website.com/BLOG URL PATH from a different host than my main website.com host?
-
Is there a way to host my website.com/BLOG URL PATH from a different host than my main website.com host? Is it accomplish-able with DNS settings or are there other considerations that might lead to complications doing this?
Specifically, we are investigating install WordPress on a dedicated host, JUST to power the blog for our main website, but our main website is on an internal proprietary hosting and CMS. So basically we're trying to host:
website.com --> OFF OF CURRENT INTERNAL HOSTING
website.com/blog/ --> OFF OF THIRD PARTY HOSTING (USING WORDPRESS)
I know this is a technical question beyond the scope of SEO, but I'm figuring there are members of the community that may have tried this already so I'm floating it here. Many thanks!
Cheers.
-
The majority of the configuration needs to happen on the server hosting the main website, Alex. Because essentailly, the visitor isn't even going to be aware of the existence of/URL for the other infrastructure. They're going to go to example.com/blog, and example.com's server configuration is going to deliver them the content from someotherserver.com which hosts the WordPress install.
In addition to the proxy configurations, you may need to deal with cookies, SSL configurations and potentially other server header information that needs to be maintained between the requests passing back and forth between the different servers as well.
This is a pretty common requirement in enterprise configurations though - to keep the software running the blog from potentially interfering with or compromising the security of the main site infrastructure. So like I said - eminently do-able, but not trivial to implement.
Does that answer your question?
Paul
-
Thanks so much Paul! Is this something that can be setup unilaterally by the new third-party hosting company, or does it have to 'live' and be deployed INSIDE our own org as part of our main hosting architecture in order to server those requests back out to the other third party webhost?
Please let me know if you know. Regardless, the feedback is appreciated!
Cheers
-
Yup, using a reverse proxy is the way to do it. Not trivial to set up - you have to have a high level of server administration permissions to do it.
Paul
-
Thanks so much for your input! Much appreciated!
-
The best way of doing it (I'm sure you already know) is on a subdomain. I believe there is a way to do it via a reverse proxy (although I have never done it). See this article. Good luck!
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
-
Best URL when adding an SSL certificate . . .
Our (small) company is a little late to the party on this, and we've only just realised that we're better off with an SSL certificate for our website. (Yes I know, I know, but we dropped SEO some time ago after getting severely bitten by a certain Penguin, and are only just making tentative step back to it after those intervening years, so we're running to get back up to date with these things.) This has now been implemented, but our web guy has dropped the 'www' element during the process. Our http://domain.com address has always historically been redicrected to our main http://www.domain.com address. Now our web guy has implemented the SSL cert, our website URL is appearing as https://domain.com, and he has redirected the http://www.domain.com to that new URL. Obviously all our historic (and more recent) link building has been to the http://www.domain.com address. Is this an issue, should the new Https URL keep the 'www', or does it make no difference what so ever? Conversely could it actually be of benefit dropping the 'www.' because our keyword specific product URL's are now 4 characters closer to the http and 4 digits shorter? Finally, on the links we have control of (professional trade associations etc) do we need to ask them to change the links to the new Https address, or does the transition from Http to Https make no difference?
Web Design | | Wookii0 -
Switched from Wix to Wordpress dreaded hashtag URL
Recently took over managing a site for a non-profit which was using the dreaded Wix. Switched over to Wordpress but now Google still has the old URL's with the hashtag. Can't forward them in .htaccess and don't want to add javascript for fear of slowing down load time. I found a solution that seems like it will take hours and hours of work. I found the solution at http://www.thedriversgarage.com/web-technology/redirecting-hashbang-urls-wix-urls/ but it seems like it would take hours with all the URL's. I submitted an XML sitemap in Google webmaster tools. My question is, how serious could this effect SEO for my site? Google accepted the new sitemap but still has the old URL's in SERP. How long does this generally take to remove? Will the hashtag URL's penalize the site for duplicate content? If so is there a way to tell Google the homepage without hashtags is the page with original content? Sort of like the rel=canonical tag which I know wont work as the hashtag URL's all redirect to the homepage so they will all have the tag. Does Google ignore the hashtag? Could there even be a benefit to this, possibly the homepage getting more page authority due to the redirects? How serious is this? Thanks in advancing.
Web Design | | limited70 -
Responsive image plugins and seo / crawlability
Note : For the background of this question please read the preface below. Ive been researching responsive image options the main issue i can see with them is that they are not semantic html so bots may not index them correctly. For instance many of the responsive image plugins use data-src for an image rather than src. Does any one have any experience with this and if it impacts on SEO ? Does any one know of a client side responsive image soltion that uses a normal img tag with the image stored in the src and with the option to set an alt attribute ? **Preface : ** Ive got a site we are currently developing, the site has a large full width responsive image slider. To serve images that wont be pixilated we are making the width of the images 1800px wide (which should cover most screens, but isn't actually big enough if the site was viewed on a 27" imac) these 1800px wide images weight about 350kb - 500kb per image and our image slider has about 20 of them. As you can see this would be a problem for anyone with a connection slower than c.10 mbps. This is especially true for mobile devices that will be downloading an image 1800px wide although only require a much smaller one, this coupled with a 3g connection will make the site really slow.
Web Design | | Sam-P0 -
URL Structure
Hello, Within the last few months, my company launched a brand new website for our clients. Unfortunately, the web developers we went through aren't very knowledgeable on SEO practices and as a result, our URL structure is a total mess. I'm looking for some advice on the best way to go about a possible restructure of the URL's or what you suggest I should do from here. Any advice helps. Thanks! Lauren McLaughlin
Web Design | | LMcLaughlin0 -
Will changing our URL's to MVC friendly URL's have a positive or negative affect on our rankings and link juice?
We've recently changed our site over to a new hosting system, we've got similar pages and are now looking at changing the URL's to ensure we do not loose our link juice from our previous site. My question is regarding the URL's, is it worth us changing our URL's to MVC friendly URL have a good or bad affect on our rankings and or link juice? Thanks
Web Design | | SimonDixon0 -
Wordpress/ Insert Tables/ SEO
I'm using Wordpress to create websites and blogs. I have limited (non-existent) HTML Coding knowledge. I'm looking to insert tables within my pages with information. Inside of these tables I want certain names to link to another page with more specific information about that name. I'm using a plugin called "WP Tables Reloaded" it simple helps you to create aesthetically pleasing tables without needing to know HTML Code or CSS. The issue is... when you create this table and insert it to the post, the only thing that shows on the sites back-end page is the table I.D. and the only thing that shows in the HTML is the tables I.D. It looks like this... [table id=2 /] I don't think search engines will be able to crawl this table, thus I won't be receiving any credit for the links being used within the table. Am I right about this?
Web Design | | AndySolo0 -
Long URLs due to foreign characters
I have a site which provides forum sections for various languages. When foreign characters are used in the post title, each letter is replace by a three character replacement such as %93. This conversion makes the URLs long. The site's software automatically uses the thread's title in the URL. It is never a problem except in these instances. Any suggestions on how to handle this issue?
Web Design | | RyanKent0