[Solved?][NEW] More Eyes on Website, Improve SEO with Cloudflare Subfolder instead of Subdomain

Okay awesome. Can you please provide insight how you migrated from Ghost to the functionality built in Bubble?

I’m unclear on the challenge. Is that you have a Bubble app on AppNameHere.com and:

  1. a separate blog system (Ghost, etc.) on blog.AppNameHere.com?
    or
  2. a separate Bubble app on blog.AppNameHere.com?

Well you’re literally just building a Ghost clone in Bubble. Sure it can’t do absolutely everything Ghost can and some SEO features like subdirectories to show topic clustering aren’t really possible in Bubble without playing around with URL rewrites, but if you want a blog with h tags, image alt text, link attributes etc, then Bubble can definitely do that.

The one key thing is finding a text editor that outputs HTML and displaying your blog as a HTML block instead of a text block. However in saying that there’s nothing stopping you from creating a blog built on a repeating group (if you really wanted to).

In short, it works.

However if there is a reliable solution that enables users to use Ghost instead of building their own blog functionality in Bubble, then that’s going to be more robust from an SEO perspective. Only caveat is it’s just a bit harder if they’re trying to create a seamless visual experience between their blog and the rest of their site.

I have a Bubble app on AppNameHere.com and want to have a seperate blogging system on AppNameHere.com/blog instead of blog.AppNameHere.com.

However, for performance and SEO, it seems having the home and landing pages on W e b f l o w will be more beneficial.

This would move the W e b f l o w website to AppNameHere.com and I intend to move the Bubble app to AppNameHere.com/marketplace instead of marketplace.AppNameHere.com.

Got it @juicebox. Currently have a blog built in Bubble, you can see it here. I thought @levon meant migrating date from a Ghost blog into a Bubble built one which had me confused. I realize now he means that he used to use Ghost but built the functionality on Bubble, and now uses Bubble instead of Ghost.

I’ll provide a bit more context on where my concern lays:

I checked my website on SEMrush, a leading SEO tool and it doesn’t recognize the keyword “ATV” in the body, title, H1 or meta tags. Which I find bizarre considering my entire website is about ATV, UTV, Jeep, motorcycle, boat and jet ski rentals. But when you inspect outrec.com it shows the keywords in the the body, title, H1 and meta tags.

That combined with the GTmetrix score of an “F” and PageSpeed Insights score of 15 for mobile and 17 for desktop along with other forum posts here, here, here and this article, it raised a few concerns. I remade the same page on W e b f l o w, and it performed better on GTmetrix and PageSpeed Insights with a mobile score of 51 and a desktop score of 99. I then compared the performance of my website to Ghost. For this test, I used a builtwith.com to find blogs that used Ghost. The GTmetrix score was 100% and the PageSpeed Insights scores were 79 for mobile and 95 for desktop.

The attached screenshots are from my SEMrush account.


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That leaves me assuming W e b f l o w for the home and landing pages and Ghost for the blog.

The issue lays in moving from blog.AppNameHere.com to AppNameHere.com/blog; moving the Bubble app from marketplace.AppName.com to AppNameHere.com/marketplace. Which is why Cloud Flare is needed.

Without it, we miss out on the exponential increase organic traffic moving from blog.AppNameHere.com to AppNameHere.com/blog

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This doesn’t entirely surprise me, tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs have historically struggled with webpages that are reliant on client-side javascript to build the page. This is because they’re just scanning the page source and not actually rendering the page.

Yeah I don’t think anyone is disputing that Bubble really struggles with Lighthouse and GTmetrix (which also uses Lighthouse). Using a platform like Ghost would drastically increase these scores and more importantly from an SEO perspective, Core Web Vitals.

So yeah, we’re keen to see how you might achieve this with Cloudflare workers as it’s been tried before by @stephane but it just got too hacky in the end to be a reliable solution.

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The plan now is to have the Webflow domain as the main domain. Bubble for the app functionality. Ghost for the blog. Webflow as the main domain may allow this to work. Will research the Webflow forum and report back.

In the mean time, here are some additional resources. Courtesy of Webflow customer support.

Medium Article on Reverse Proxy
Cloud Flare Reverse Proxy Defintion
Additional Proxy Info, see excerpt below

How a reverse proxy works

Step 1: To setup a reverse proxy you’ll need to access your .htaccess file on your main website. Essentially you’re asking your main domain to return a request for /subfolder/ from the subdomain.
Step 2: Once you have the same content on /subfolder/ as you do on your subdomain you need to make sure there’s no chance of getting penalised for duplicate content. To do this you’ll need to ensure that no subdomain pages are being indexed.
Step 3: Then you’ll also need to transfer over your link juice that’s pointing to the original URLs. To do this you’ll need to implement a canonical tag that points to the /subfolder/ URL for each of the subdomain URLs.
Step 4: To ensure search engines aren’t crawling the old URLs, you’ll also have to add a disallow directive in the robots.txt file hosted on the subdomain.

**UPDATE: Found someone on the Webflow forum who has done it between two websites.

From Webflow forum user:


Yes we did solve it. Check out:

derekprince.com

Derek Prince Ministries | Ultimate Bible Teaching Collection

Equip and inspire your faith with a range of Bible teaching resources featuring the timeless wisdom and trusted biblical insights of Derek Prince.

derekprince.com

Derek Prince Ministries Japan | Ultimate Bible Teaching Collection

Equip and inspire your faith with a range of Bible teaching resources featuring the timeless wisdom and trusted biblical insights of Derek Prince.

We ended up seeking professional assistance, so I don’t have any real insights apart from… we used Nginx. We established subdomains for each with reverse proxy to subfolder arrangement.

Another interesting thing we discovered… you can’t use the auto sitemap generator through Webflow for this. It will point to the subdomain locations. Hope this helps.


End of his quote. Posting here for everyone’s reference.

A bit on how to optimize javascript SEO:

I want to get on board with helping and promoting this cause for SEO on Bubble

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Credit to @chris.williamson1996 for suggestsing to check with Webflow.
Credit to Dennis Wong in the Webflow forum, going to attempt this:

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page load speeds have been the primary downside to bubble apps for a while now. Great to finally see some forum discussion :slight_smile: Would 100% be interested in paying for a solution like this.

A little tip that’s helped me in the past: make your index page completely blank, with workflow conditionals to redirect the user onto another page.

Then, add your SEO keywords onto the blank index page as text – no groups, one style, all invisible.

A little workaround for peeps, especially for apps with a heavy homepage.

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Update: Mostly finished with the development of Webflow landing pages. Now for Cloudflare.

I would be interested in a solution as well. Let me know how I can help.

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@tyler7, why wouldn’t you use Webflow for the blogging part as well?

Interested in this, as Google very recently came out and said that there was no difference.

So wonder what is causing the difference.

And yes, Cl*udflare can do the subfolder redirects for you. But…is it needed.

SEO tools should work if you turn on javascript in them. Yes?

But even with a 30 second wait … most of my Bubble subpages are getting pinged as orphans.

Very confused.

We could, however I would like to test the performance of three different tools vs. two.

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Hello Bubble friends,

I am happy to announce the Subfolder/Subdomain constraint has been theoretically solved. You can find the technical details here.

If you’re interested in making money implementing this, please message me. Looking to hire ASAP. You would be a community hero. We will share results and learnings in this forum thread. To my knowledge, you will be the first to solve this in practice on Bubble.

Cheers,
Tyler

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