Will using a reverse proxy give me the benefits of the main sites domain authority?
-
If I am running example.com and have a blog on exampleblog.com
Will moving the blog to example.com/blog and using a reverse proxy give the blog the same domain authority as example.com
Thanks
-
Yes, example.com/blog/ will typically perform better than blog.example.com and exampleblog.com, and the more decent links that are pointed to the blog and the main site, the bigger the expected impact from combining them.
One word of warning - reverse proxies are complex and many teams encounter major developer headaches. Oftentimes it is easier to find a different way to set up content to be published on a subfolder like /blog/.
If you want to leave notes on what type of website you are working on (CMS or other software type for both regular site and blog) I am happy to leave notes if it's one I recognize.
-
From my own experience, yes. In a previous position, I did exactly that, specifically for a blog, using Akamai as the technical solution for the reverse proxy. I used the reverse proxy only because the e-commerce web site was hosted by a provider who would not also host a Wordpress site on their servers. So, I had to host the Wordpress site on another provider, and used a reverse-proxy to make it accessible as a directory beneath our normal subdomain.
The only difference was that I used the reverse proxy to "move" it from a "blog" subdomain of the root domain, to the "www" subdomain. So, like from blog.example.com to www.example.com/blog/.
And yes, after moving it, I can say that we did see some ranking benefits. As well, from every indication I could observe, it looked the the world (including search engines) like it was actually hosted on www.example.com. IP address lookups, and other efforts to try to see if it was on its own subdomain no longer turned up any indications.
So, I can't say with 100% certainty that the search engines can't somehow detect through the reverse proxy that it is really on another host, but I'm pretty confident.
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
-
Shopify Site with Multiple Domains?
Hey there! My client has a website on Shopify. I don't even know how to open this can of worms, but let me try. The site URL is: https://mobilityequipmentforless.com/ However, there is another (older?) URL that gets updated as the main site gets updated and shows the exact same content. It's a straight duplicate, but is it's own URL and doesn't redirect to the main site. https://www.powerchairrecyclers.com/ And this isn't the SITE.Shopify back-end site name that was used for set up initially. I just have no idea what's going on here. Not sure if it's a serious error that needs to be fixed, or if it's something weird with how Shopify work. Any insight would be immensely helpful. Thanks! Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | naturalsociety0 -
Launching Brand New Subdomain To Outrank & Outperform Main Domain
Fellow Mozzers! I have a tricky problem that may or may not have a viable solution. It's one that our team are 100% pressing ahead with regardless & I wanted to canvass some opinion on what options I have. We have the Main Company Site which has been going for +15 years, has a DA of 58 and 63,000 links pointing at it. It currently ranks on page 1 for a number of our important keywords. However.... We are now launching a Subdomain, which will be something like marketing.maincompanysite.com which we now want to drive a lot more of our traffic to. In particular for items like new customer acquisition, product discovery etc. In fact we would actually rather the subdomain outrank our main site for branded queries. However the Main Site is still important for existing customers who login to our product and we don't want to do anything that will destabilize it's rankings too much. My questions are: Are there any strategies I can use to get a subdomain (with no links or history) outranking the main site in position 1 on Google? Main site should still rank in position 2! Any other tips to actively take legacy traffic from a main site onto a subdomain seamlessly. Should we just be 301 redirecting unnecessary pages on the old site to new and improved pages on the subdomain? There will still be a 100,000+ pages on the main site, lots of authority and traffic going through it. It's not becoming redundant. Thanks so much guys - hopefully I've explained that okay!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MattStott40 -
Can you give me some advices to rank this domain?
Hi Moz community, I've a coleague that's working to rank this site: www.devsar.com. The selected keywords are:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gaston Riera
Mobile development
Web development
Django Development
Python Development I've checked the site: It's fast and clean. Has a good PA and DA. It's responsive and good lookking. Meta description , title, hreflang.. everything in order. Link profile a little rare (checked with ahref.com), it's because someone made a mistake redirecting some expired domain Can you help me to help my mate out?
Thanks
GR.0 -
Has anybody ever seen (or written) a case study on increasing domain authority?
I am an in-house digital marketer for a small business in the UK. The majority of our business comes from people finding us on Google's organic SERPs for relevant search terms. Our website has been around since 1999 and we have established a great base of keyword rankings in that time from key vanity keywords in our field that generate a tonne of long tail rankings for the product pages on our site. Last year, I was given the target of increasing our websites DA from 40(something) to 60+ by the end of the year. I put a plan together at the start of the year which included things like 'create awesome content', 'promote awesome content', do 'proper' link building, do 'real' PR, make sure technical SEO is all up to scratch, increase CTR, reduce bounce rate etc etc But... I wanted to find some examples of case studies where SEO's had taken a site with a starting DA of 'whatever' and increased it to 'a way higher whatever'. I found a tonne of 'How to increase your domain authority' type blog posts which said things like 'create awesome content', 'promote awesome content', 'do proper link building' etc etc but no hard data case studies from people who had been successful in doing it! I really just wanted to make sure that the plan I was putting together, was focused on the right things! Does anybody know of any case studies? I'm still keen to check them out. Being a small business, it's often the case that once we've put a plan together, we quickly realize that we don't have the resources, time, personnel or budget to follow it through but at lest having the plan confirmed by successful case studies doing the same thing or similar would really encouraging! Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RichAlive
Rich0 -
I have an authority site with 90K visits per month. Now I have to change from non www to www. Will incur in any SEO issues while doing that? Could you please advice me on the best steps to follow to do this? Thank you very much!
Because I want to increase site speed, Siteground (my hosting) suggested I use Cloudflare Plus which needs my site to have www in order to work. I'm also using a cloud hosting. Im a bit scared of doing this, and thus decided to come to the community. I used MOZ for over 6 months now and love the tool. Please help me make the best possible decisions and what steps to follow. It would be much appreciated. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Andrew_IT0 -
Will an inbound follow link on a site be devalued by an inbound affiliate link on the same site?
Hey guys, quick question I didn't find an answer to online. Scenario: 1. Site A links to Site B. It's a natural, regular, follow-link 2. Site A joins Site B's affiliate program, and adds an affiliate link Question: Does the first, regular follow link get devalued by the second affiliate link? Cheers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ipancake0 -
Does Yahoo Directory Listing Pass Authority with PA:0 and 0 links from 0 Root Domains?
So we already have our brand listed in Yahoo Directory for a few years but today I noticed it is not listed in OSE and the pages we're listed on in Yahoo Dir are PA:0 / DA: 100 with 0 links from 0 Root Domains! (or with a PA:1) Does this mean no juice is being passed at all for this listing? Does it mean it is not even spidered by Google then as how can it be found if no inlinks? Does any authority still get passed from Yahoos domain with DA100 despite pages being PA0? I ask because I'm considering adding another company to Yahoo Dir to get some authority rather than traffic.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | emerald0 -
Penalty for using expired domain?
I was wondering if anyone has any experience using dropped/expired domains with old "clean" backlinks for new sites. Is there be a penalty for doing this (with good intent)? Worth a reconsideration request?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EdgySEO0