Reverse proxy a successful blog from subdomain to subfolder?

[bedbugsupply]

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?

[joshibhargav_20]

Hey, I have a question in this:

We have setup a seperate Google Analytics ID and Google Search Console Property for the sub-domain and then if we are using reverse proxy to keep it under sub-directory.

So what happens to the GA tracking and Google Search Console in this case?

You can read my full question here:

[KalaSEOs]

Hi there,

Im investigating the same reverse proxy solution for my eCommerce blog. was your implementation successful?

[Philip-DiPatrizio]

Canonical will pass link juice almost exactly like 301s will, so there's no harm in going that route.  Matt Cutts explains that in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zW5UL3lzBOA

You sound like you're good to go.  You've got duplicate content worked out, and you've got a plan to retain link juice (canonical).

[bedbugsupply]

Since the subdomain does still exist live, someone doing a reverse proxy would need to take some steps to mitigate duplicate content issues. The first would be to set up the new permalinks and rel canonical tags via Wordpress and Yoast's SEO plugin (which rocks, btw). Then you would need to do the robots.txt/GWT steps that you quoted. If there's anything else that needs doing, I am definitely all ears before I attempt this.

[Philip-DiPatrizio]

Ah!  I misunderstood the bit about reverse proxying.  In that case... to be perfectly honest, I'm not sure.

When you setup a reverse proxy, what happens to the sub-domain?  Does it go away or does it still exist live?  If it remains live, you'd end up with a duplicate content issue.

EDIT >> I found this at the source you linked to (which answers my question) -->

"The next thing you can do is add a robots.txt file to the sub-domain that stops robots from indexing it. As Reverse Proxying keeps the requested URL the /blog/ URLs will use the robots.txt from the main domain rather than the sub-domain.

The final (and most extreme) thing you can do is to register Google Webmaster Tools for the sub-domain and remove it from the index. If you are doing this, you need to do it in conjunction with robots.txt."

[bedbugsupply]

Thanks for your response, Philip. My research indicates that a 301 redirect on a location that is being reverse proxied would result in an infinite loop. (source) I haven't tested it to confirm, though. Is that true?

[Philip-DiPatrizio]

You need to setup 301 redirects for ALL of the pages and posts on the blog sub-domain to their new locations in the sub-folder.  This is very important.  Without the proper redirects in place, you will lose all value from links pointing to the blog sub-domain, plus all the history, authority, and rankings that the pages have earned.

As for your reasoning to move it from a sub-domain to a sub-folder, I'm not sure you'll receive any sort of link juice boost on your root domain from doing this.  Maybe someone else can prove me wrong/correct me...