What are the downsides and/or challenges to putting page paths (www.example.com/pagepath) on a different server?

[bradgreene]

Hi,

Our company is organized into three different segments and our development team recently needed to switch a portion of the business to subdomain because they wanted to move to a different server platform. We are now seeing the impact of moving this segment of the business to a subdomain on the main domain. SEO is hurting and our MOZ score has dropped significantly.

One fix they are debating is moving everything back to one domain, but place segments of the business on different page paths and hosting specific paths on different servers. I.e. the main domain could be www.example.com hosted in one location and then www.example.com/segment1 would be hosted on a different server. They are hoping to accomplish this using some sort of proxy/caching redirection solution.

The goal of this change would be to recapture our domain strength.

Is this something that is a good option or no? If not, what are the challenges and issues you see arising from doing something like that as I don't know of any other site set up like this.

Thanks in advance.

[HiveDigitalInc]

This is actually more common than you might think, though you probably don't even realize it sometimes.  I've only seen this with forums, blogs, multi-language/geo sites, etc.. that are hosted with different technologies on different servers (Cart on IIS, Blog on LAMP, etc..) and the SEO/Dev team has agreed this is better than a subdomain path.

The biggest challenge will likely be in ensuring the load times aren't affected, but this can generally be easily overcome by hosting the different servers in the same datacenter, caching elements on the master server, etc..

Cheers,

Jake