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.
Using a Reverse Proxy and 301 redirect to appear Sub Domain as Sub Directory - what are the SEO Risks?
-
We’re in process to move WordPress blog URLs from subdomains to sub-directory. We aren’t moving blog physically, but using reverse proxy and 301 redirection to do this.
- Blog subdomain URL is https://blog.example.com/ and
- destination sub-directory URL is https://www.example.com/blog/
Our main website is e-commerce marketplace which is YMYL site. This is on Windows server. Due to technical reasons, we can’t physically move our WordPress blog to the main website.
Following is our Technical Setup
- Setup a reverse proxy at https://www.example.com/blog/ pointing to https://blog.example.com/
- Use a 301 redirection from https://blog.example.com/ to https://www.example.com/blog/ with an exception if a traffic is coming from main WWW domain then it won’t redirect. Thus, we can eliminate infinite loop.
- Change all absolute URLs to relative URLs on blog
- Change the sitemap URL from https://blog.example.com/sitemap.xml to https://www.example.com/blog/sitemap.xml and update all URLs mentioned within the sitemap.
SEO Risk Evaluation
We have individual GA Tracking ID and individual Google Search Console Properties for main website and blog. We will not merge them. Keep them separate as they are.
Keeping this in mind, I am evaluating SEO Risks factors
- Right now when we receive traffic from main website to blog (or vice versa) then it is considered as referral traffic and new cookies are set for Google Analytics. What’s going to happen when its on the same domain?
- Which type of settings change should I do in Blog’s Google Search Console? (A). Do I need to request “Change of Address” in the Blog’s search console property? (B). Should I re-submit the sitemap?
- Do I need to re-submit the blog sitemap from the https://www.example.com/ Google Search Console Property?
- Main website is e-commerce marketplace which is YMYL website, and blog is all about content. So does that impact SEO?
- Will this dilute SEO link juice or impact on the main website ranking because following are the key SEO Metrices. (A). Main website’s Avg Session Duration is about 10 minutes and bounce rate is around 30% (B). Blog’s Avg Session Duration is 33 seconds and bounce rate is over 92%
-
I wrote this on my phone and I will update this in 2-3 hours
rewrite the URLs do not redirect
-
PS
tools like CloudFlare & Fastly don’t care what you’re server is .
https://blog.cloudflare.com/subdomains-vs-subdirectories-best-practices-workers-part-1/
https://blog.cloudflare.com/subdomains-vs-subdirectories-improved-seo-part-2/
https://moz.com/community/q/reverse-proxy-a-successful-blog-from-subdomain-to-subfolder
frontend ssl_in
bind :443 ssl crt /etc/haproxy/website.com.combined
acl root path /
acl blog path_beg /blog
acl sitedomain path_beg /leasopedia
acl glossary path_beg /glossary
acl wpadmin path_beg /wp-
acl blog_search query -m reg ^s=.$
acl blog_preview query -m reg ^p=.*$use_backend wpengine if blog OR sitedomain OR glossary OR wpadmin OR root blog_search OR root blog_preview
default_backend main-sitebackend wpengine
server wpengine examplecompany.wpengine.com:443 ssl ca-file /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crtbackend main-site
server main-site example.examplecompany.com.:443 ssl ca-file /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crthttps://blog.examplecompany.com or https://examplecompany.com/blog.
It’s worth noting that WPEngine does not recommend this practice.
For those that want to host at https://site.com/blog and do it with a managed WordPress hosting provider like WPEngine, this article is for you.
(Note, WPEngine will automatically block your reverse proxy, so you will need to contact customer support and ask them to whitelist its IP address in their firewall. I found this to be a painless process thanks to the friendly support staff at WPEngine.)
How?
The trick to getting the blog to look like it’s living on the main site (but actually living elsewhere) is to use a reverse proxy.
HAProxy is a powerful reverse proxy, though its configuration has a bit of a learning curve compared to Nginx or Apache.
We use HAProxy internally because it works well with AWS Elastic Load Balancers, which frequently change their IP address. Learn more
HAProxy config
| 1 | bind *:443ssl crt/etc/haproxy/website.com.combined |
You’ll need to use SSL, as all WPEngine installs redirect to SSL.
Of note is that HAProxy expects your certificate chain and your private key to be combined into one file
| 1 | acl |
These are the pattern matching lines that we’ll use to determine which traffic is forwarded to WPEngine
| 1 |
use_backend wpengine ifblog orsitename ORglossary ORwpadmin ORroot blog_search ORroot blog_preview
|
This directs /blog*, /sitename*, /glossary* and /wp-* to WPEngine.
You can replace these with your own blog and page paths configured in wordpress.
This line also directs /?s= and /?p= to wordpress using the combined root and blog_search and blog_preview lines.
These are necessary to making searching and page previews work in WordPress.
| 1 | default_backend main-site |
Everything that doesn’t match one of the above patterns will go to the main site.
| 1 | backend wpengine |
Directives in the frontend that resolve to this backed will route to the blog.
| 1 | backend main-site |
Directives in the frontend that resolve to this backed will route to your main site.
I would use Fastly
https://thoughtbot.com/blog/host-your-blog-under-blog-on-your-www-domain
https://blog.cloudflare.com/subdomains-vs-subdirectories-best-practices-workers-part-1/
-
Hi I have done this for 20+ websites.
Following is our Technical Setup
- Setup a reverse proxy at https://www.example.com/blog/ pointing to https://blog.example.com/
please remember that the hosting or reverse proxy on the server is so important. Some managed WordPress hosts do this better then others.
https://pressidium.com/ now offers reverse proxy's on all plans for free
if you want to do this with out having to worry about it any problem I cannot stress how easy it is done by hosting the blog on Pagely.com it’s now free!
(don’t worry about the $200 they don’t change it)
https://support.pagely.com/hc/en-us/articles/213148558-Reverse-Proxy-Setup
or kinsta for $50 more a month
https://kinsta.com/knowledgebase/reverse-proxy/
Pantheo.io (my go to host) now offers the “Advanced Global CDN” it lets you run a reverse proxy & much more via Fastly (my favorite CDN) the cost is very reasonable.
https://pantheon.io/product/advanced-global-cdn
Servebolt.com offers reverse proxy & hosts all PHP sites Wordpress too. They use CloudFlare & they will setup everything for you for free. They are also a full enterprise partner
https://servebolt.com/help/article/cloudflare-workers-reverse-proxy/
You can also use Fastly, CloudFlare business, Incapsula, Cloudfront
2. Use a 301 redirection from https://blog.example.com/ to https://www.example.com/blog/ with an exception if a traffic is coming from main WWW domain then it won’t redirect. Thus, we can eliminate infinite loop.
This is something that is very easy I would use Fastly
- Change all absolute URLs to relative URLs on blog
NO don’t do that it will hurt your site & will not help you change the URLs they need to be rewritten not made relative it’s a very bad way of trying to do this and will not help your site.
- Change the sitemap URL from https://blog.example.com/sitemap.xml to https://www.example.com/blog/sitemap.xml and update all URLs mentioned within the sitemap
Our main website is e-commerce marketplace which is YMYL site. This is on Windows server. Due to technical reasons, we can’t physically move our WordPress blog to the main website.
If you’re website site is YMYL I would use Pagely but Linode , AWS can do this to with Fastly or Nginx
https://thoughtbot.com/blog/host-your-blog-under-blog-on-your-www-domain
<code>location /blog/ { proxy_pass https://blog.example.com; proxy_set_header Host $host; proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme; }</code>
<code>please let me know if you need help
Tom</code>
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
-
Do bulk 301 redirects hurt seo value?
We are working with a content based startup that needs to 301 redirect a lot of its pages to other websites. Will give you an example to help you understand. If we assume this is the startups domain and URL structure www.ourcompany.com/brand1/article What they want to do is do a 301 redirect of www.ourcompany.com/brand1/ to www.brand1.com I have never seen 301 as a problem to SEO or link juice. But in this case where all the major URLs are getting redirected to other sites i was wondering if it would have a negative effect. Right now they have just 20-30 brands but they are planning to hit a couple of hundreds this year.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aaronfernandez0 -
Does removal of internal redirects(301) help in SEO
I am planning to completely remove 301 redirects manually by replacing such links with actual live pages/links. So there will be no redirects internally in the website. Will this boost our SEO efforts? Auto redirects will be there for incoming links to non-existing pages. Thanks, Satish
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Will the use of lightbox affect SEO?
I am looking to condense a features list on my pricing page. it is currently a static list however I want the user to click a button and a full list of standard features will pop up in a lightbox. How will this affect my SEO? Can Google read content in a lightbox?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ParkerSoftware0 -
Using pictures from another domain
We are building several sites for several clients which will be using images from the manufacturer. Our dev team wants to insert the manufacturer's url for the images, instead of actually downloading the image and hosting on our server. There are thousands of images, so downloading images to our server will be time consuming, so we are looking for a shortcut.... however I'm concerned this will cause other issues. Is using manufactueresdomain.com/12345.jpg going to cause SEO issues? will this generate Google penalties? Since we are not able to control the image file name, we cannot optimize it. We will add Alt text and Title tag for each image, but the file name is random characters. How important is the file name for SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Branden_S0 -
Domain Alias SEO
We have 5 domain alias of our existing sites
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | unibiz
All 5 domain alias are domain alias of our main site. It means, all domain alias will have exactly same site and contents
Like Main domain: www.mywebsite.com
DomainAlias: www.myproduct.com, www.myproduct2.com, www.myproduc3.com
And if anybody will open our site www.myproduct.com, it will open same website which I have in primary site what can i do to rank all website without any penalty....i s there any way? This is domain alias of in hosting industry Thanks0 -
301 or 302 Redirects to Mobile Site
When it's detected that a mobile device is accessing the site it has the ability to redirect from www.example.com to m.example.com. Does it make more sense to employ a 301 or 302 redirect here? Google says a 301 but does not explain why (although usually I stick to "when in doubt, 301") . It seems like a 302 would prevent passing link juice to the mobile site and having mobile-optimized results also showing up in Google's index. What is the preference here?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOTGT0 -
301 Redirects After Company Acquisition
We recently acquired a company, and now we are going to redirect all of the pages on their site to their respective pages on our site. Do we need to keep the original pages on their site active? For how long? Ideally, we would like to redirect everything and remove the old site entirely so we don't have to pay to keep hosting it. Is this possible? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pbhatt1 -
How do I go about changing a 302 redirect to a 301.
Hello Friends! Thanks for viewing my question. Ok,My question today is How do I go about redirecting a 302 link to a 301 link. I understand the benefits of doing this as far as link juice and how the Search Engines views the two Re-Directs. I am wanting to know where I would start to do this. Thank you in advance for any help or suggestions!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FrontlineMobility0