Proxy Servers & SEO

[abisti2]

Does putting a blog on a proxy server (the pointed at the main site) hurt SEO? i.e. can Google tell? And if they can, does it matter?

My server people won't use PHP on their servers but we want a Wordpress blog. So their suggested solution is that they put the blog on a proxy server and point it at the ourdomain.com/blog subfolder on our site. So to all intents and purposes it's hosted in the same place.

They assure me this is normal practice and point out that our (main site) images are already being sourced from a CDN.

Obviously we'll deal with Google not seeing two separate versions of the same site. But apart from this, is there any negative effect we could suffer from in SEO terms?

[abisti2]

Anyone..... ?

[TheSymmetran]

Something like that can be done, but you must exercise care to not get slapped for duplicate content penalties. There can only be one place for that content in the eyes of your users and google, meaning the funny proxy server should never itself be visible to public. But if you do this right, you can have the content rendered on your desired page on your site which should get captured by Google properly as well.

But if you really want to be sure, test it, setup a test page like this without all the fancy dev work. and have google crawl your site and see what it reports back after it picks up that page.

I think you will be ok if you do your research and do not miss your rel canonicals or other countermeasures for duplicate content.

However it gets rendered on your /page, make sure google console can show/see the same content there.