If you serve your website using https and you have setup your nginx or Apache to redirect all http-requests to the https equivalent, then you might get bad ratings from Google and other search engines if you don't handle bad requests properly. This means the search engines don't like it if you answer on a request with a 301/302 redirect response and when they then request the URL from the Location header, they receive a 404.

Since the webserver itself can hardly determine whether a particular URI is valid or not if the respone is created from a dynamic backend, you cannot solve this problem in the Apache/nginx config directly.

That's where this seo-proxy comes in handy: it will take incoming requests and forward them to the configured target. If the target responses with a 200 status, then the proxy will redirect the client to that target URL. If it's a 404 response, the proxy will serve that response directly.

To speed things up, this proxy caches all previously requested URLs and the according response. For now it just keeps them in memory, but adapters to caching backends like Redis or memcache are planned.

1. Download the zip file or clone this repository

   git clone https://github.com/CodeLoversAt/seo-proxy.git
   cd seo-proxy

2. Install dependencies

   npm install

3. Create a new config.json from the template config.dist.json and update the file to match your setup.

   cp config.dist.json config.json

4. Start the proxy

   node index.js
   > Proxy started on http://127.0.0.1:8888

5. Setup your webserver to forward all http requests to your proxy instance. Here's a sample nginx server configuration:

   upstream proxy {
       server 127.0.0.1:8888;
   }
   
   server {
           listen 80;
           
           server_name example.com www.example.com;
   
           location / {
               proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
               proxy_set_header Connection "upgrade";
               proxy_http_version 1.1;
               proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
               proxy_set_header Host $host;
               proxy_pass http://proxy;
           }
   }

You might want to run that proxy as a service on startup. We suggest using node-startup or forever for that purpose.

MIT