Using a Colo Load Balancer to serve content

[Vizergy]

So this is a little complicated (at least for me...)

We have a client who is having us rebuild and optimize about 350 pages of their website in our CMS.  However, the rest of the website will not be on our CMS.  We wanted to build these pages on a sub-domain that is pointed to our IPs so it could remain on our CMS--which the client wants.  However, they want the content on a sub-directory.  This would be fine but they will not point the main domain to us and for whatever reason this becomes impossible per their Dev team.

They have proposed using a Colo Load Balancer to deliver the content from our system (which will be on the sub domain) to their sub directory.

This seems very sketchy to me.  Possible duplicate content?  Would this be a sort of URL masking?  How would Google see this?  Has anyone ever even heard of doing anything like this?

[MichaelC-15022]

They're right in that you do NOT want the content to be on a different subdomain--in most cases, Google doesn't share domain authority across subdomains.

You can do a reverse proxy to handle this--see Jeremy's writeup here.

Load-balancing is a fairly generic term.  I'm really familiar only with BigIP F5 hardware load balancing and Microsoft's software-based load balancing, but it's possible that some load balancing solutions can handle things like the reverse proxy would.

[Everett]

Hello Billy,

As you're probably aware, load balancing services are for distributing traffic to more than one server in order to maintain high performance even when traffic levels spike. There is nothing wrong with this from an SEO perspective, as it all happens server-side before the user agent (e.g. Google) ever receives anything. It is a common practice amongst enterprise-level websites.

However, you are right to be concerned about this implementation, as it is definitely not the intended use of the technology, and sounds like a workaround instead of an actual fix. It may be a good workaround if you only allow one version of the content to be indexed, and ensure proper use of cross-domain rel canonical tags. Or you could even simply block anyone, including Google, from accessing the non-canonical version (on your subdomain, I take it) by returning a 401 (unauthorized) or a 403 (forbidden) status code.