SEO issues with masking blog domain?
-
We have a client who would like to move their Wordpress blog into a different server from their main site's server for security reasons. However, the blog is almost 10 years old with good traffic and rankings and we'd rather not have them change the domain.
The developer has come back with a URL "masking" rule in .htaccess that will display the contents of the blog placed in the new server under a subdomain but still show the blog's original URL.
If we block the new subdomain from indexing to avoid duplicate content - are there any SEO implications for doing this? Will Google see it as a deceptive practice and tank the blog's rankings?
Any advice is greatly appreciated.
-
You are welcome
-
Thanks for all of your help!
-
Yes, you can also you can add no index tags.
-
Thank you Roman. Yes, we definitely don't want the new subdomain to be crawled/indexed. In addition to using the canonical link as you mentioned, couldn't we block it with robots.txt?
-
Domain Masking: Don't do it
A very common scenario I see all the time working on small business, local SEO projects, is a situation where a client owns multiple domains, and they've "masked" those domains to their primary domain. I see this all the time, enough so that I thought it warrants a quick tip.
Domain masking is where you have one domain, let's call it domain1.com, and that domain is actually serving content from another domain, let's call that domain2.com (my domain naming creativity astounds you!).
So, with domain masking, if I type "http://domain1.com" into my browser's address bar, I get a page that appears to be identical to the page I get if I type "http://domain2.com" into my browser's address bar. Okay, so this is much more difficult to explain than I thought. Maybe it'll help if I explain what a redirect is, and how that's different from domain masking.
Let's say you set up a redirect from domain1.com to domain2.com. If you type "http://domain1.com" into your browser's address bar, you'll end up with the actual website located at domain2.com, but, and this is the really important part, the URL in your browser's address bar will actually change. In other words, when you type in domain1.com, the server responds and says, "hey dude, domain1.com has moved, it's new location is domain2.com." Your browser then says, "ok," and asks for domain2.com instead. You can see this in action if you type "http://www.wordpresshacker.com" into your browser's address bar. Watch what you just typed and you'll see it change to rlmseo.com and you'll end up on our homepage. That's because wordpresshacker.com is a domain we own and it's redirected to rlmseo.com.
This is different from domain masking in that with domain masking, if you type domain1.com, your browser won't ever get a message that says domain1.com has moved to (or is actually located at) domain2.com. Rather, the server says, "ok, I've got that page, here it is," and it gives you the content from domain2.com.
Why is domain masking bad?
If you've ever heard the word duplicate content, then you know why this might be bad. What happens when Google visits domain1.com and then visits domain2.com?With a redirect, Google sends a request for domain1.com and the server tells Google that content has moved to domain2.com. The result is Google only finds the content on domain2.
With domain masking, Google sends a request for domain1.com and the server responds with the content from domain2.com, without telling Google the content has moved. Then, sometime down the line, Google might send a request for domain2.com and the server responds with the same content. The result is the exact same content is served from two completely separate URLs…in other words it's a major duplicate content problem.
Now, even though there's no such thing as a duplicate content penalty per se, there's the potential there for the search engines to get confused about which domain is the primary, and you could end up with all kinds of issues down the line.
So, avoid domain masking and instead, opt for a 301 redirect.
Here are a few options that might work for you:
- You could keep the two separate domains and build each of them up with unique content, and be transparent about the interlinks between them.
- You could combine your materials into a single website. This is the approach we took with this site.
- You could set up the two separate (and unique) websites and then wait for a period of time for links to really-exciting-paper.com to build up. Then you could set up a 301 redirect to pass some of the accumulated link equity to the other domain.
- You could follow the pointer/masking approach that you describe, and ensure that one domain is not being crawled and indexed. The ideal approach here is with a canonical tag and will convey to Google these are duplicate sites, example:
Place a canonical reference on both domains pointing to your preferred domain:
http://www.really-exciting-paper.com
What you decide is to do is based on the goals you want to achieve. I want to point out that contrary to some convention SEO wisdom, there is no real “penalty” from Google for having duplicate content or domain masking. The negative outcome of domain masking is mainly the potential for confusing Google, and diluting your domain power which will negatively impact your SEO presence. We hope one of these ideas we’ve provided will suit your needs and preferences!
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
-
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%
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | joshibhargav_200 -
WordPress Themes and SEO
I am helping out a client with updating their website.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cangelmarketer
The theme they currently have hasn't been updated in ages (I am going to guess years). Would there be a difference in updating to the most recent version of their theme and changing them to a completely different theme? Or because they update in the current theme is so large anyway, it won't make a difference in terms of SEO. The reason I ask is that they don't know their Themeforest details to log in and download the most recent version of the theme, so they would have to re-purchase it, and with the hosting, they have access to a range of themes includes in their package. Thanks0 -
Merging Domains
Up until last week, we had separate domains for each of our 3 products. We've now merged two products to sit under one URL. The merge coincided with a CMS upgrade which effectively killed all of our old URLs save for the homepage. Is it best for me to 301 the old homepage to it's new place, as well as the rest of the old site's top pages to according pages on the new site? Or is there a better solution?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | taylor.craig0 -
Sub domain on root domain
Hello,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dror999
I have a question that I can't find a good answer on.
I have a site, actually a "portal"/ "directory" for service providers.
Now, for start, we opened every service provider own page on our site, but now we get a lot of applications from those providers that thy want sites from their own.
We want to make every service provider his own site, but on sub domain url. ( they don’t mind… its ok for them)
So, my site is www.exaple.com
There site will be: provider.exaple.com
Now I have two questions:
1. can it harm my site in SEO?
2. if one from those sub domain , punished by google because is owner do "black hat seo" , how it will affect the rood domin? It can make the root domain to get punished?
Thanks!!0 -
Adding another domain to my VPS, would it effect SEO?
I set up my business site on a VPS and its working great. The site is doing well ranking for my keywords. I have another domain name that I was going to host on the VPS also. The site will be in a completely new business and there will be no overlapping keywords at all. A separate business altogether. Can someone tell me if adding another site to the VPS I have cause any SEO issues as the last thing I want to do is negatively effect my main business site Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters0 -
Pagination Issues
Hi, My press release section is showing pagination issues (duplicate pages) http://www.me-by-melia.com/press/ I know they are showing 27 duplicate page titles which would be a easy fix. Do you recommend pagination? Let me know if u see any other issues.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Melia0 -
Does duplicate content on a sub-domain affect the rankings of root domain?
We recently moved a community website that we own to our main domain. It now lives on our website as a sub-domain. This new sub-domain has a lot of duplicate page titles. We are going to clean it up but it's huge project. (We had tried to clean it even before migrating the community website) I am wondering if this duplicate content on the new sub-domain could be hurting rankings of our root domain? How does Google treat it? From SEO best practices, I know duplicate content within site is always bad. How severe is it given the fact that it is present on a different sub-domain?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Amjath0