Ranking drop after using reverse proxy for blog subdirectory and robots.txt for old blog subdomain
- by user40387
We have a 3Dcart store and a WordPress blog hosted on a separate server. Originally, we had a CNAME set up to point the blog to http://blog.example.com/. However, in our attempt to boost link-based and traffic-based authority on the main site, we've opted to do a reverse proxy to http://www.example.com/blog/.
It’s been about two months since we finished the reverse proxy migration. It appears that everything is technically working as intended, including some robots and sitemap changes; the new URLs are even generating some traffic, as indicated on Google Analytics.
While Google has been indexing the new URL locations, they’re ranking very poorly, even for non-competitive, long-tail keywords. Meanwhile, the old subdomain URLs are still ranking mostly as well as they used to (even though they aren’t showing meta titles and descriptions due to being blocked by robots.txt).
Our working theory is that Google has an old index of the subdomain URLs, and is considering the new URLs to be duplicate content, since it’s being told not to crawl the subdomain and therefore can’t see the rel canonicals we have in place. To resolve this, we’ve updated the subdomain’s robot.txt to no longer block crawling and indexing. Theoretically, seeing the canonical tag on the subdomain pages will resolve any perceived duplicate content issues.
In the meantime, we were wondering if anyone would have any other ideas. We are very concerned that we’ll be losing valuable traffic, as we’re entering our on season at the moment.
