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.
Does using a reverse proxy to make a subdomain appear as a subdirectory affect SEO?
-
Using a reverse proxy only makes it appear that a subdomain is really a subfolder. However, links in the end remain the same. Does this have any negative (or positive) impact on SEO? Does it make it difficult from the blog's (subdomain's) sitemap or robots.txt file to be properly read by search engines?
-
Hi,
I have similar query for the specifc case. This also involves tracking on Google Analytics and Search Console Setup. Could you have a look at this question and share your thoughts? https://moz.com/community/q/using-a-reverse-proxy-and-301-redirect-to-appear-sub-domain-as-sub-directory-what-are-the-seo-risks
-
Also, quick question: when you say to be careful not to serve the robots file under the subfolder, should we delete it then? The subdomain is actually a wordpress site that serves as a blog, and so it's got its own robots file. So, right now, both robots files (main site + wordpress) are coexisting.
-
Awesome! Thank you!
-
You can set it up to have the subdomain completely hidden behind the reverse proxy, if you do so, google won't notice any difference. If the subdomain is in the same local network you can just disconnect it from the internet, if you can't you can still set the subdomain robots.txt to reject crawlers. Just be carefull to do not serve the robots txt under the subfolder.
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
-
New theme adds ?v=1d20b5ff1ee9 to all URL's as part of cache. How does this affect SEO
New theme I am working in ads ?v=1d20b5ff1ee9 to every URL. Theme developer says its a server setting issue. GoDaddy support says its part of cache an becoming prevalent in new themes. How does this impact SEO?
Technical SEO | | DML-Tampa0 -
Old URLs Appearing in SERPs
Thirteen months ago we removed a large number of non-corporate URLs from our web server. We created 301 redirects and in some cases, we simply removed the content as there was no place to redirect to. Unfortunately, all these pages still appear in Google's SERPs (not Bings) for both the 301'd pages and the pages we removed without redirecting. When you click on the pages in the SERPs that have been redirected - you do get redirected - so we have ruled out any problems with the 301s. We have already resubmitted our XML sitemap and when we run a crawl using Screaming Frog we do not see any of these old pages being linked to at our domain. We have a few different approaches we're considering to get Google to remove these pages from the SERPs and would welcome your input. Remove the 301 redirect entirely so that visits to those pages return a 404 (much easier) or a 410 (would require some setup/configuration via Wordpress). This of course means that anyone visiting those URLs won't be forwarded along, but Google may not drop those redirects from the SERPs otherwise. Request that Google temporarily block those pages (done via GWMT), which lasts for 90 days. Update robots.txt to block access to the redirecting directories. Thank you. Rosemary One year ago I removed a whole lot of junk that was on my web server but it is still appearing in the SERPs.
Technical SEO | | RosemaryB3 -
Coming soon SEO
Hi, I was wondering what is the best practice to redirect all the links juice by redirecting all the pages of your website to a coming soon page. The coming soon page will point to the domain.com, not to a subfolder. Should I move the entire website to a subfolder and redirect this folder to the coming soon page? Thanks
Technical SEO | | bigrat950 -
Reverse proxy a successful blog from subdomain to subfolder?
I have an ecommerce site that we'll call confusedseo.com. I created a WordPress blog and CNAME'd it to blog.confusedseo.com. Since then, the blog has earned a PageRank of 3 and a decent amount of organic traffic. I am considering a reverse proxy to forward blog.confusedseo.com to confusedseo.com/blog/. As I understand it, this will greatly help the "link juice" of the root domain. However, I'm concerned about any potential harm done to the existing SEO value of the blog. What, if anything, should I be doing to ensure that the reverse proxy doesn't hurt my "juice" rather than help it?
Technical SEO | | bedbugsupply0 -
No index on subdomains
Hi, We have a subdomain that is appearing in the search results - I want to hide this as it looks really bad. If I were to add the no index tag to the sub domain would URL would this affect the whole domain or just that sub domain? The main domain is vitally important - it is just that sub domain I need to hide. Many thanks
Technical SEO | | Creditsafe0 -
Use of title tags on divs for SEO purposes
Hello community, I recently was asked by a client to analyze a website of a competitor. I did was he asked me to do but when I looked at the source code of the website I found this code: I changed the exact words into something for privacy reasons, but I never looked at a code like this.
Technical SEO | | JarnoNijzing
Using a div for an anchor I get but adding a title tag to the div? I never seen that before. Title tags on anchors, yes, using images in divs as background and then adding a title??? Does anyone have any experience with a code like this and if you do how does this impact rankings? Does it impact rankings at all and does anybody know of any correlation between the two? Looking forward for your responses. Regards Jarno0 -
What are the potential SEO downsides of using a service like unbounce for content pages?
I'm thinking of using unbounce.com to create some content driven pages. Unbounce is simple, easy-to-use, and very easy for non-devs at my company to create variations on pages. I know they allow adding meta descriptions, title tags, etc and allow it to be indexable by Google, but I was wondering if there were any potential downsides to using unbounce as opposed to hosting it myself. Any help would be appreciated!
Technical SEO | | Seiyav0 -
Does using parentheses affect the crawlers?
Quick question: if you using a parantheses around a keyword, do search bots still recognize the keyword? Fox ex: Welcome to a website about the National Basketball Association (NBA). Will the bots recognize that I'm trying to optimize to NBA and not (NBA)? Is this different for tags vs. actual body copy?
Technical SEO | | BPIAnalytics2