Q: Deal Breaker?! Why Reverse Proxy instead of CNAME??
I see the way you allow Sumolings to use their own domain is reverse proxy, not CNAME.
"ChatGPT has this to say about it :(
1. Will the Reverse Proxy Affect SEO Compared to a CNAME?
Yes, Here’s the impact:
SEO Downsides
Google may not fully associate blog content with your main domain.
Since the actual content is still hosted on my-domain.buildfastblog.com, search engines might not pass full SEO benefits to mydomain.com/blog. Some search engines might struggle to index the blog properly.
Canonical URLs & Metadata
If the blog at mydomain.com/blog does not include proper rel=canonical tags pointing to mydomain.com/blog (instead of buildfastblog.com), Google might attribute rankings to the BuildFast subdomain instead."
Why do this with reverse proxy? Could you switch to CNAME so SEO is on point? Seems much better for your users.
_paruladitya_
Feb 23, 2025A: Hey,
We actually support both approaches - you can use either CNAME+TXT records for domains/subdomains, or reverse proxy for subpaths which doesn't need DNS entries. Let me break this down:
For domains or subdomains (like blog.yoursite.com or yoursite.com):
- You only need to add CNAME and TXT records
- No reverse proxy needed
- Straightforward setup
For subpaths (like yoursite.com/blog):
-------------------------- Technical details of how hosting on sub path works ----------------------
If you want to host the blog on the path, then there are NO DNS entries needed for CNAME or TXT. So when a user types the url- https://yoursite.com/blog, the hit doesn't come to our server but goes to YOUR server, and you have to create a reverse proxy that will call our server with the headers that we need to make the blog work in the path.
We have a working example of that reverse proxy using Cloudflare workers and you could do the same in how your server tech stack works. See this guide as reference https://help.buildfast.blog/article/dac3cddd8da54a56abd072a4371a9c96-how-to-host-your-buildfast-blog-on-a-subfolder-of-your-main-domain-on-cloudflare
Others have used AWS, nginx, apache or their custom reverse proxy to achieve that.
We enable on our side the domain & path where the blog can be proxied to, but how you reverse proxy is upto your server stacks
----------------------------------------------------
Regarding the SEO concerns - they are only applicable if the issues are not handled, but I want to assure you that we've carefully addressed this. Our system:
- Ensures only your domain is indexed by Google, not our subdomain
- Implements proper canonical URLs pointing to your domain
- Handles all necessary SEO meta tags and signals
pandacat