Does link juice pass along the URL or the folders? 10yr old PR 6 site

[jasonsixtwo]

We have a website that is ~10yrs old and a PR 6. It has a bunch of legitimate links from .edu and .gov sites. Until now the owner has never blogged or added much content to the site. We have suggested that to grow his traffic organically he should add a worpress blog and get agressive with his content.

The IT guy is concerned about putting a wordpress blog on the same server as the main site because of security issues with WP. They have a bunch of credit card info on file.

So, would it be better to just put the blog on a subdomain like blog.mysite.com OR host the blog on another server but have the URL structure be mysite.com/blog?

I have tried to pass as much juice as possible.

Any ideas?

[jasonsixtwo]

This is very helpful information! I believe this is what the admin had proposed. I just wanted to double check with you guys.

I will have to check into the cc info. I am not sure exactly what they have.

Thanks!

[jasonsixtwo]

hmmmm..... yeah I am not sure. I will check into that.

[ThompsonPaul]

The Reverse Proxy capabilities of both Apache and IIS are designed to do exactly what you're trying to do, Jason. A reverse proxy allows you to host the WordPress installation on any server, then proxy it so it shows to the users as served from yourdomain.com/blog.

You definitely want the new blog to sit at yoursite.com/blog if you want it to help the ranking value of the primary site.

Reverse proxies are not trivial to set up, but they're not that difficult for an experienced system administrator - especially in this case as you are building the WordPress blog from scratch (far fewer redirection hassles)

As EGOL notes though - if you have actual cc data stored, you better make sure it meets compliance whether you do the revers proxy or not. If you just mean you have PIO (Personally Identifiable Information) like name, address etc on that server, then a reverse proxy can help keep potential WordPress security issues from compromising that.

Here's a Moz blog post/infographic on reverse proxies as a primer.

Hope that helps?

Paul

[EGOL]

Why do they have CC info on file?  Are they PCI compliant?

I would get rid of the CC data or put it in the hands of a very secure service provider.

I would do that for security and so that I could place the blog in a folder on the primary domain.

[StreamlineMetrics]

If you can put the blog in a subdirectory such as www.mysite.com/blog, then that would be ideal because the link juice will be preserved on your site. If you put the blog in a subdomain like blog.mysite.com, then the search engines consider them to be two separate sites and thus the link juice is split between the two sites.