Has anyone successfully merged their subdomain for LPs to their parent domain for SEO purposes?

[Anonymous]

Hi all,

Like many of you, we run all of our demand generation pages through Marketo and we are losing potential SEO value by doing so.

Has anyone successfully done something like a reverse proxy pass or something similar to retain their value for SEO?

Let me know what you think!

[Anonymous]

Hey everyone!

I'm not a developer, so I'm unfamiliar with reverse proxies and the like, but we do have a developer in-house. I'm commenting here to see what your thoughts about SEO and Marketo LPs are. Does using a Marketo LP disallow us from being scored? Right now we embed forms onto our Wordpress site but I'd like to try using Marketo LPs for better tracking, etc. but my team has brought up the concern that our scores will either be damaged, or those pages will not be scored at all. Is this true? How would we go about alleviating this issue?

Thanks for any and all input!

[Anonymous]

Hi Sarah,

To my understanding -- if you run landing pages on marketo using a subdomain such as info.website.com, or pages.website.com -- it is being treated as a separate site as your www.website.com...

With that being said, you would essentially be competing with yourself in the rankings for the same keywords (if you're targeting the same on both sites).

One option we had considered was de-indexing our Marketo LPs and running them specifically for PPC, and then creating duplicates on our CMS to retain rank value, and domain authority for those target keywords... This plan isn't scalable, especially when you consider other regions/languages globally...

The #1 solution would be to pass the subdomain through a reverse proxy ie: info.website.com/landingpage to website.com/info/landingpage, etc.

We are working here internally with our development teams to see what is possible, and also reaching out to our Marketo rep as well.

Will keep this thread updated!

[Anonymous]

Hi JP,

Were you able to solve this using the reverse proxy? Interested to know how it went. Thanks!

[Anonymous]

Hi Alison,

Unfortunately this project fell through the cracks after our developer at-the-time left the company.

This is still something I'd like to try and tackle during the first half of this year.

Still looking for any tips/tricks if others have completed this task!

[SanfordWhiteman]

Have you chosen which CDN or reverse proxy you'll be using for this project? B/c all tips and tricks will be product-specific. The general technical goal is too simple to need tricks....

[Anonymous]

I think our CDN is Amazon CloudFront but I'm not 100% sure.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Well, of you can confirm that it's CF, I can help describe the method (probably over on my blog) but if it's not, that would be kind of a red herring for you.

[Anonymous]

Resurrecting this oldish topic, I'd like to read more about this reverse proxy on your blog. I googled your name and found your blog hoping you would have covered the subject there but couldn't find it. (Very interesting blog though).

This subdomain issue is quite puzzling to me actually because landing pages are designed to support SEO are they not but with the subdomain being potentially (still conflicting opinions on this around the interwebs) less ranking in google I wonder that this is still an issue. I mean the only option to not compete with yourself would be the no indexing and that just seems so counter-intuitive to me

[SanfordWhiteman]

Hi Wiebke,

Thanks for looking it for it. It's a firm draft (blog post #106!) and even has this super-awesome diagram:

But I need to finalize the copy. Let's say 2 weeks?

[Anonymous]

Looking forward to read your blog.  I came to this topic because first we wondered if subdomains or folders rank better in google and I have yet to see a convincing answer...the interwebs to disagree a bit there. And then the question is also do the subdomains have to be merged to the parent domain or is it actually possible to add canonic tagging to the landing pages ensure google understands what and how to treat them. It's strange that this doesn't seem so much ingrained into the products as one of the purposes of landing pages is to help SEO ranking.

So essentially I might broaden the scope to two questions

1. Is it possible to merge landing page subdomain to parent domain (folder) and how?

2. Is this even necessary or could we avoid 'competing' in terms of google rankings between landing pages and main pages through canonical tagging.

Or 3. Am I looking at this somehow wrong?

I hope the things I wrote make sense, it's late here.

Cheers from snowy (yes!) Finland.

[SanfordWhiteman]

I steer clear of saying unifying LPs with your corporate domain will solve an actual SEO problem.

Like you said, there's rampant disagreement about whether it helps, with Google reps themselves saying it doesn't at certain points, only to be ignored later as their quotes are possibly obsolete. But the uncertainty itself is a problem, and I'm certain that unifying the two will not hurt ranking!

rel="canonical" I don't believe can help here, since a given LP has no other canonical representation if it's only available via a single URL (you can't just canonicalize stuff to other content).

[Erik_Heldebro2]

Hey Sanford!

I tried looking for your blog post you mentioned was in the works, did you end up posting one?

[Josh_Hill13]

I agree.

But here's the thing - I wouldn't think of it as merging. You either post your landing pages and forms on the main site, or you don't. We made a conscious decision to post all SEO potential pages on the main site and only use Marketo for ephemeral events, webinars, things that need rapid deployment and won't hang out long.

Then we set redirects to the new pages on the main site.

[Anonymous]

Yes, confirmed that CF is one of our CDNs.

[Anonymous]

Thanks JP! I'll keep an eye out for your updates! And I'll bring up the reverse proxy with my developer.

[Brittany_Stover]

When at Summit I inquired about this as well. If you are using Google analytics on your website to track SEO you can grab the same code and put it on your Marketo Landing Pages to sync the two together. This way you can have multiple landing pages and still get SEO scores.

[Anonymous]

Hi Brittany,

I'm aware that we can track both domains in GA easily, although I don't think that adds the SEO value of the subdomain to the parent domain.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Done it for a couple of brands, both with IIS ARR and with Amazon CloudFront, though for technical reasons rather than SEO.

You have to be very careful with caching, as Marketo LPs may be totally dynamic (though their subsidiary assets are usually not, and your main site may be considered publicly cacheable). If you're already familiar with how reverse proxies work, you shouldn't have any problem.

[Anonymous]

So I have no clue on where to look/start looking.

Do you have any documentation for some of the work you did? About how many hours did it take to do? Workload?

Let me know what you think.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Do you have any documentation for some of the work you did? About how many hours did it take to do? Workload?

ARR is complex on-premises software, so let's leave that one alone unless you happen to be running IIS 7.5+ (and have access to administer it).

With CloudFront, which has a far smaller set of features, it's largely a matter of adding a new CF Origin for your Marketo LPs pointing to Marketo, then adding a new CF Behavior that says, for example, "Pathnames that start with /pages should go to the Marketo LP Origin."

But understand that if you are using CloudFront (or any similar CDN setup) in order to have your corporate website and your LPs appear under the same hostname, you must also have your corporate website running via the CDN.  There's no way around this: your www.example.com hostname can only be served from in one place/service, and all users must enter your site through the same entry point in order to see the pages under one roof.