Has anyone successfully merged their subdomain for LPs to their parent domain for SEO purposes? | Community
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A
Anonymous
June 13, 2016
Question

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

  • June 13, 2016
  • 4 replies
  • 4440 views

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!

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4 replies

Josh_Hill13
Josh_Hill13
Level 10
June 13, 2016

If it's that important, you can use form embed to move pages to your main site.

A
Anonymous
June 16, 2016

Hey Josh,

We've done this in the past, but we lose the ability to use progressive profiling, as well as auto-fill, etc.

This could be a good interim option (and run PPC pages through MKTO non-indexed) until we figure it out.

SanfordWhiteman
SanfordWhiteman
Level 10
June 16, 2016

We've done this in the past, but we lose the ability to use progressive profiling, as well as auto-fill, etc.

ProgPro and AutoFill both work on embedded forms.  It's only PreFill that does not. Common misconception/misnomer.

    SanfordWhiteman
    SanfordWhiteman
    Level 10
    June 14, 2016

    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.

    A
    Anonymous
    June 16, 2016

    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
    SanfordWhiteman
    Level 10
    June 16, 2016
    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.

    Brittany_Stover
    Brittany_Stover
    Level 4
    June 14, 2016

    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.

    A
    Anonymous
    June 16, 2016

    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.

    A
    Anonymous
    June 21, 2016

    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!

    A
    Anonymous
    June 22, 2016

    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!

    A
    Anonymous
    June 22, 2016

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

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