Consider deploying at subdirectory instead of subdomain

[spalladino]

Keeping the docs at a subdirectory (ie openzeppelin.com/docs) is better for SEO than using a subdomain (ie docs.openzeppelin.com) (read here).

If you're a startup or small business looking to optimize your SEO, consider subdirectories over subdomains. Boosting the authority of your root domain should be a universal goal of any organization. The subdirectory strategy concentrates your keywords onto a single domain while the subdomain strategy spreads your keywords across multiple distinct domains. In a word, the subdirectory strategy results in better root domain authority. Higher domain authority leads to better search rankings which translates to more engagement.

Consider the multitude of disruptive PaaS startups with docs.disruptivepaas.com and blog.disruptivepaas.com. Why not switch to disruptivepaas.com/docs and disruptivepaas.com/blog to boost the authority of your root domain with all those docs searches and StackOverflow backlinks?

However, to avoid losing the current positioning, we need to ensure every existing page is properly 301'ed to the corresponding subdomain.

[frangio]

This can be achieved by using a Netlify rewrite in the main site (OpenZeppelin/openzeppelin.com), but I'm not sure if we can do a rewrite + a 301 redirect without causing a loop. Netlify may be smart enough to break the loop, but we have to try and see what happens.

[spalladino]

Not sure I see where we would be generating the loop. The rewrite+redirect should happen only on docs.oz.com, and never if the domain is plainly oz.com.

[frangio]

I'm not sure if we're talking about the same things. Can you explain the configuration that you have in mind to implement this?

By "rewrite" I meant Netlify's feature of configuring a redirect with status 200. Thus, we would have a line like this in the redirects configuration for openzeppelin.com:

/docs/* https://docs.openzeppelin.com/:splat 200!

A loop may be generated if the redirects for the docs site then look like this:

/* https://openzeppelin.com/docs/:splat 301!

[spalladino]

Thanks, now I see your point. If we test this and indeed generates a loop, we should be able to go around it by setting up a new domain that actually serves the docs, let's say docs-for-real.oz.com (as a placeholder...). So the rules would look like:

openzeppelin.com/docs/* https://docs-for-real.openzeppelin.com/:splat 200!
docs.openzeppelin.com/* https://openzeppelin.com/docs/:splat 301!

[frangio]

We can also use the *.netlify.com domain for that purpose.