SEO Best Practices with Cloudflare Workers, Part 2: Implementing Subdomains

Recap

In Part 1, the merits and tradeoffs of subdirectories and subdomains were discussed.  The subdirectory strategy is typically superior to subdomains because subdomains suffer from keyword and backlink dilution.  The subdirectory strategy more effectively boosts a site's search rankings by ensuring that every keyword is attributed to the root domain instead of diluting across subdomains.

Subdirectory Strategy without the NGINX

In the first part, our friend Bob set up a hosted Ghost blog at bobtopia.coolghosthost.com that he connected to blog.bobtopia.com using a CNAME DNS record.  But what if he wanted his blog to live at bobtopia.com/blog to gain the SEO advantages of subdirectories?

A reverse proxy like NGINX is normally needed to route traffic from subdirectories to remotely hosted services.  We'll demonstrate how to implement the subdirectory strategy with Cloudflare Workers and eliminate our dependency on NGINX. (Cloudflare Workers are serverless functions that run on the Cloudflare global network.)

Back to Bobtopia

Let's write a Worker that proxies traffic from a subdirectory – bobtopia.com/blog – to a remotely hosted platform – bobtopia.coolghosthost.com.  This means that if I go to bobtopia.com/blog, I should see the content of Continue reading

SEO Best Practices with Cloudflare Workers, Part 1: Subdomain vs. Subdirectory

Subdomain vs. Subdirectory: 2 Different SEO Strategies

Alice and Bob are budding blogger buddies who met up at a meetup and purchased some root domains to start writing.  Alice bought aliceblogs.com and Bob scooped up bobtopia.com.

Alice and Bob decided against WordPress because its what their parents use and purchased subscriptions to a popular cloud-based Ghost blogging platform instead.

Bob decides his blog should live at at blog.bobtopia.com – a subdomain of bobtopia.com. Alice keeps it old school and builds hers at aliceblogs.com/blog – a subdirectory of aliceblogs.com.

Subdomains and subdirectories are different strategies for instrumenting root domains with new features (think a blog or a storefront).  Alice and Bob chose their strategies on a whim, but which strategy is technically better?  The short answer is, it depends. But the long answer can actually improve your SEO.  In this article, we'll review the merits and tradeoffs of each. In Part 2, we'll show you how to convert subdomains to subdirectories using Cloudflare Workers.

Setting Up Subdomains and Subdirectories

Setting up subdirectories is trivial on basic websites.  A web server treats its subdirectories (aka subfolders) the same as regular old folders in a Continue reading

Managing DNS Records For The People With Cloudflare Apps

DNS records are hard.  Many people, even the technically competent, don’t understand more than the basics.

I'll speak for myself — as someone who always learned just enough about DNS to get it working, then immediately forgot everything until the next time it broke. It was a vicious cycle until I convinced myself to learn it in depth.  Meanwhile, non-technical folks wisely avoid meddling in such dangerous affairs all together.

Surely, there must be a better way (this is a blog post after all).

Every day, thousands of Cloudflare users add DNS records to their Internet properties to configure awesome tools like G Suite, Shopify, Wordpress, Ghost, and thousands of others.  A new Cloudflare Apps feature allows apps to automatically set up and manage configurable DNS records on more than 12 million registered domains on the Cloudflare network. In short, Cloudflare Apps are here to alleviate the Internet’s collective DNS woes.

Gone are the days of tribulating over whether it’s A or CNAME you should set.  Gone are the days of puzzling between A and AAAA records while wondering what the heck happened to AA and AAA records?  Unload your DNS dysphoria onto highly trained developers experienced at explicating these Continue reading