Does setting up a HubSpot blog in a subdirectory via reverse proxy improve SEO?
Currently, our Hubspot blog is running on a subdomain and we’d like to run on a subdirectory of our site. Our Hubspot representative suggested we can do this Using a Reverse Proxy.
Our main website is external (not hosted on the HubSpot CMS) and “Using a Reverse Proxy” if we host our HubSpot blog on a subdirectory of our site.
Can we get equivalent SEO benefits? Moderator Note: this post was reviewed for relevancy and optimized for clarity on April 1, 2026. Thank you for your contributions to the HubSpot Community!
Your question cannot have a straightforward answer.
There has been many discussions on this topic. But I’d quote John Mueller’s (Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google) words here. He says,
If you want to put a blog on your main site in a subdirectory that’s fine, if you want to put it in a subdomain that’s fine.
Basically he meant that it doesn’t matter if you keep your blogs on the same domain or another. There won’t be any impact on the SEO.
However, if we have a look at the history of switching to subdirectories from subdomains, the results were often positive.
Majority of the domains saw a hike in their visibility, traffic, and rankings after making the switch. But also keep in mind, this depends case to case and nothing can be predicted.
But to answer your question, I’d say, yes you’d get equivalent SEO benefits after switching to subdirectory.
P.S. If your blog is old, established and running well, I won’t recommend you to switch it to the subdirectory. But still if you have to do it, do it meticulously and take care of every technical aspect.
Moreover, having your blog on subdirectory is more convenient as all your pages would be at the root domain which makes the management a bit easier.
But before switching to the subdirectory, I’d highly recommend you to go through this cognitive SEO blog on the same topic. You’ll get a better idea about the things.
You might want to also check this: "Reverse proxy support overview".
I agree with @Sam62. The SEO benefits are usually positive moving to a subdirectory, but it has to be done properly. Depending on how many blogs you have and how big the site is, it can be quite a task.
As far as the reverse proxy goes…I would never do it. Mainly because I don’t have that much technical know-how hahah but I always say with SEO if you cut corners, it’s gonna come back to you one day. With the proxy, you’re relying on multiple servers instead of one (per se). The more you need to rely on just for things to work, the more you’re at risk of something going wrong.
I would invest in a developer to move everything over to the subdirectory, make sure it’s done right the first time, and then not worry about it again. Just my two cents.
While a reverse-proxy approach is not theoretically that complicated, I’d agree with David that it’s not an ideal solution - another point of failure, something that’s easy to get wrong or to have fall over. Having your blog inaccessible for a period when a crawler arrives is certainly not going to help with any SEO!
I think there may be another option though - but I’m not 100% sure so perhaps @DavidDennison or @Sam62 would advise on this one. My SEO skills are not really that up-to-date
It depends on a number of things mainly on how big the website is. If he has 3,000 pages and 2,800 are blog posts that are being redirected, they are going to have a tough time. Every redirect is going to take up some PA and crawl budget. If the website is big enough, it’ll never get crawled. That’s because the internal links within the content would also need to be 301’d and then the next thing you know the crawler is jumping from link to link going in circles just trying to find the end. So you’d have massive redirect chains which would hurt a lot of things, including page speed loading time, which we all know is becoming a huge ranking factor.
That’s how I understand it at least. Migration and whatnot isn’t something I’m particularly experienced in. But as I always say, when you keep SEO simple, it will ALWAYS work better.
Well, just as someone told you above, there isn’t a straightforward answer to this question. But, theoretically speaking, I know guys who admit that using a reverse proxy can benefit a lot your search engine optimization. But, once again, it depends on very many factors. Just like someone else said above, it depends on the website size as well.
