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Hi Jamie,

For the reverse proxy method, the search engine will perceive that the blog is on the main domain (domain y). As far as any user or Googlebot is concerned, the blog is on domain y in a subfolder – they never see domain x. If you do this, your main challenges will be:

• Making sure that domain x can't be accessed directly (otherwise, your entire blog will exist in two places). They should only be able to access the blog by visiting the correct subfolder on domain y. Domain x can be configured to only accept connections directly from domain y.
• Making sure to configure the proxy correctly. They can be tricky, and may take up some of your team's time.
• Making sure everything remains fast. Although Googlebot has nothing against proxies, if the inclusion of the proxy introduces a big delay to the page load time, that's going to have a negative impact.

Hi Mike,

Ideally, yes, you'd just have the one URL. If you were setting up a site from scratch, I would tell you to avoid having the same content on those two different pages, because we don't want to create any duplication where it isn't strictly necessary. An example of when it is strictly necessary would be something like a ?sort_products parameter which changes the order products are displayed on a page. There's no way to do that without some duplication, so the canonical tag is useful. It's good practice to avoid having more versions of the page than you need because it reduces the number of ways things can go wrong.

But as this structure is already in place and seems to be working OK -- only one version of the page is indexed -- I would leave it as it is. Messing around with the canonical now will likely do more harm than good. There aren't any definite negative effects for your SEO by leaving things as they are.

As for your question about aggregation, I assume you mean in Google Analytics? No metrics will be aggregated there -- the two pages will appear as separate URLs in your reports. The aggregation that matters for indexation is link equity. When you get links to example.com/page, it will help the rankings of the example.com/category/page URL because that's the canonical version.