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I need to move a section of my website to another server because it is taxing our current web server.

However, I cannot afford to lose page rank on any pages within the section of the site that must be moved.

Furthermore, the URL of the pages must not be changed... visitors must still see the same URL, even though it would be served up by different hardware from a different data center.

How can this be accomplished?

Thanks

Edit:

IIS 6

It's a sub-directory that needs to be moved

Brian Webster
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2 Answers2

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The way to do this is to set up a reverse proxy in front of the web servers that will dispatch requests to each based on the URL.

If it's possible, though, it would probably be easier to just set up another subdomain like www2.example.com and then forward requests from www.example.com with a HTTP 301 redirect. That shouldn't cause you to lose pagerank, the URL wouldn't be significantly different, and old links and bookmarks would still work.

Daniel Waechter
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  • I feel like my fallback plan is to use a different URL via subdomain, but there is probably still a little bit of page rank decay via this method, as suggested by a google engineer recently http://www.stonetemple.com/articles/interview-matt-cutts-012510.shtml ... it's little enough decay that I am not concerned. I'd just rather be able to tell a client they will have 0 – Brian Webster Jun 09 '10 at 22:27
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Depends on what kind of part of the site you want to move. If it's a subdomain, you can just change the DNS record. If it's a subdirectory (i.e. within one subdomain, you want certain directories to be served by your original server and others by the new server), I'd suggest setting up a proxy server.

If you say something about what kind of software you're using, someone can provide more detailed instructions.

David Z
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