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Ok here it goes i am doing a migration BE.Net to WP.

So the main site www.clientdotnetsite.com its on server 03 and uses a SQL Server database. Its a .Net Application and will remain such.

The client said "Hey I am going to start a blog. Could we set it up to increase SEO for the main site?" So we have a blog at www.clientdotnetsite.com/Blog done in BlogEngine.Net.

Now the client says "I want it on Wordpress now!", so rather than play around with setting up an WAMP environment we decided lets migrate the blog to WordPress and have it hosted through a big box web hosting company.

So here is the challenge with SEO do we create a new sub domain blog.clientdotnetsite.com and use 301 Redirect

Or do we use the same domain and have a reverse proxy and do link rewriting in the reverse proxy ?

I am just a simple programmer, i am not an guru of any kind. So is one considered White Hat and the other Black Hat ?

I have read that we will lose PageRank with 301 Redirect but will gain it back in the long run. With a reverse proxy seems to me that because you want the traffic to go through the reverse proxy in order to provide the illusion that it's all one site. That would make it Black Hat kind of.

But i do not know, so i ask you :) Could you explain what you would do? The differences just any knowledge i could eat up like a buffet?

Community
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Keith Beard
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Flaky clients, they're the best!

You're asking, do I use a content switch or do I HTTP redirect them.

The content switch is needlessly complicated for this solution, not too mention you'll eat up a lot of bandwidth between datacenters.

Here's the simplified network route. (Go to www.mydomain.com/Blog -> [Content Switch] -> out of datacenter to myblog.wordpress.com -> back to [Content Switch] -> back to end user.

It will increase your load time (bad for SEO), increase your bandwidth costs (bad for customer), potential for breakage (bad for you).

I would HTTP redirect them. A 301 (Permanent redirect) is not as bad as people make it out to be. Just make sure you work on fixing all the inbound linkes to www.mydomain.com/blog to point to myblod.wordpress.com.

You'll want to log all 301 Redirect to see who the referrer is, then contact them to update the link.

Michael Rice
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  • Why would it increase my load time, could you clarify? He has had the blog at /blog for years and it gets good rankings if i move it to blog.dahdahdah.com how long will his juice take the hit i guess. Its just i have read so much about how this reverse proxy technique. I don't think its all that advanced the link rewriting sounds tricky. Its going to be enough of a pain to move migrate the blog, i just want to present to him why whatever choice is made was the best for his scenario. – Keith Beard Dec 16 '11 at 23:11
  • Let n = hops to wherever www.mydomain.com datacenter is located Let x = hops to new datacenter hosting myblog.wordpress.com With Content switch it requires n + x to get myblog.wordpress.com With 301 it's just x. As for how long his juice will take a hit, that's only a question Google can answer as their algorithms are proprietary. If they were in the same DC, I'd say content switch. I'm not sure if you've ever setup a load balancer, but I have and I can tell you, unless you want to learn Linux really bad as well as confs for nginx, squid, or apache, the 301 is going to be the way to go. – Michael Rice Dec 16 '11 at 23:18
  • why would i needa load balancer to configure a reverse proxy in IIS? – Keith Beard Dec 19 '11 at 15:15
  • I used load balancer, content switch and reverse proxy interchangeably. My apologies for the confusion. – Michael Rice Dec 22 '11 at 17:09