Heroku, Subdomains, redirecting to different servers & SEO

[Alternatively.marketing]

Hi all,

I've got a big question.

I'm helping out with digital marketing at a non-profit that I volunteer with.

We're working on developing an on site blog for our site, because we've realized we need that middle of the funnel content.

Our issue has been taking up much of the developers' time & we're really working out the kinks with the system, so I'm trying to alleviate that with a light blog solution.

We're considering installing a wordpress site on a separate server from the main site & sending traffic over to that.

The primary questions:

1. Do we negatively impact our main site by having a link to a different domain in the topnav?
2. Do we positively impact the main site by developing SEO content on a redirected&masked URL?
3. What are the ramifications of redirecting a subdomain to another server?
4. Would we be better off using something like Ghost?

A good example would be:

Visit theMainDomain
Click: blog on topnav
Redirect to: theSecondDomain/blog [masked as theMainDomain/blog]
Click: home on topnav
Redirect to: theFirstDomain/blog

[effectdigital]

1. Do we negatively impact our main site by having a link to a different domain in the topnav? - no, but it may not be optimum if the blog is not properly integrated into your main site. Just because something bad is unlikely to happen, that doesn't mean that keeping them separate is the best solution or the one which you could benefit most from. Lost opportunities, are also bad
2. Do we positively impact the main site by developing SEO content on a redirected&masked URL? - Definitely not
3. What are the ramifications of redirecting a subdomain to another server? - Not entirely sure but it sounds highly unusual and I would never guarantee that a project set up in such a way would rank well. Have seen quite a few people describing similar builds to us in Moz Q&A and they all seem to be complaining about lack of results
4. Would we be better off using something like Ghost? - I don't know what that is sadly, many apologies

[Alternatively.marketing]

Thank you for your responses to 1-3.

That gives me a lot of context for what we need to do to move forward.

Regarding 4, which is still a the outstanding question.

Ghost is a blog platform that we could install on the site in either a subfolder or a subdomain like blog.x.com or x.com/blog.