Thoughts on using a CDN?
-
I'm trying to decide if I should use a CDN to speed up my site. I've never used one before, but I do know that there are a lot of images on my site and I think that could help a great deal.
Are they hard to set up? Are there any down sides? And are the pricey?
Also I'm not sure even sure if it would make a difference for me, but I want to work on getting my site faster.
Thanks.
-
This in no way endorses or not any one cdn but I will share what has happened to me over the last few months.
My hosting company gave me the option of using a well known cdn free with my hosting package. Now as my site is hosted in the US and most of my visitors are from the UK I thought that would be a good idea. So end of August I enable the cdn for my site.
From mid sept the time it took googlebot to crawl an individual page on my site went up from average 150ms to over 4000ms. The number of pages crawled per day remain the same.
However looking at the index status the number of pages not selected has increase by some 30% when I have not been adding any content to the site.
At end of Sept for most of my page my ranking fell by about 950 places. There were no messages in WMT and a reconderation request came back saying no manual penalty.
At the end of Oct I disable the CDN and immeadiately the time googlebot took on each page fell back down to the 150ms mark. Rankings are yet to improve so I am not saying this was the only cause of the drop in rankings.
I am now getting a lot of 404 not found appearing in my wmt crawl errors for pages that have never exisited on my site but have no mention of the cdn in them either.
I am talking with the cdn provider at the moment so have not named them here.
-
Hi, I work at Incapsula and I've just recently wrote a 2 part Blog Post that look and CDN from a SEO point-of-view. The first post deals with SEO & CDN Myths and the second one covered CDN related SEO Benefits. I hope you`ll find this helpful.
Admittedly, I do work for a CDN provider, but I also have 7+ year of prior SEO experience (both as Freelancer, Senior Adviser, CTO and SEO/SEM Department Manager) and so, in my post, I insisted on conduction balanced discussion, using only Google official statements to prove my point.
Hope this helps.
-
I've just signed upto http://www.incapsula.com/
It was the most pain free setup compared to another I have tried.
They have various versions available. Also stopped all my spam registrations!
-
i used amazon cdn and was not impressed with the service but i have been told there are some good ones out there, it is just finding the good ones.
-
No problem. Be sure to let me know if you end up trying one.
-
I was suspicious that it might cause a rankings problem. Thanks for sharing what you read.
I would like to read an evaluation of the service done by a top SEO with deep technical knowledge. What happens when you start bouncing every visitor from a high traffic country? Will I lose image search traffic when my files are modified out to their service? What else do they add to my site or change? Sucking any linkjuice?
-
Yah, I read up on CloudFrare, but it looks like a lot of people don't like them / suggest them. Some people even saying they lost a lot of rankings after using them.
-
I was looking at CloudFlare.
I wanted to speed up the site, limit access to certain countries, and get some of their security enhancements.
The cost can be free if you use minimal services or $20/month if you want a lot more.
I didn't do it because I had some concerns about their use of my data, how they might rewrite URLs on my site with affiliate codes, how blocking certain countries might impact search rankings, and more.
I really like their services but have research to do before I decide that it is a good thing for me.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Using Multiple links/names for the same product?
I am being asked to change these product links on the home page: Home/Condo
Web Design | | RoxBrock
Watercraft/Boat to Home
Condo
Watercraft
Boat (Along with several other product links) How does this affect the customer experience/usability, and SEO? Is it a good idea or is it confusing? Thank you.0 -
Using a query string for linked, static landing pages - is this good practice?
My company has a page with links for each of our dozen office locations as well as a clickable map. These offices are also linked in the footer of every page along with their phone number. When one of these links is clicked, the visitor is directed to a static page with a picture of the office, contact information, a short description, and some other information. The URL for these pages is displayed as something like http:/example.com/offices.htm?office_id=123456, with seemingly random ID numbers at the end depending on the office that remain static. I know first off that this is probably bad SEO practice, as the URL should be something like htttp://example.com/offices/springfield/ My question is, why is there a question mark in the page URL? I understand that it represents a query string, but I'm not sure why it's there to begin with. A search query should not required if they are just static landing pages, correct?. Is there any reason at all why they would be queries? Is this an issue that needs to be addressed or does it have little to no impact on SEO?
Web Design | | BD690 -
Using H tags and its maximum Limits
hi..
Web Design | | funclub247
I want to Know what is a Maximum limit of using H tags in One Page : for Eg : I Know That I Can use Only One H1 Tag per Page, What about Other H tag Limit..
h1 - 1 time Maximum
h2 - ..?
h3 - ..?
h4 - ..?
h5 - ..?
h6 - ..?
h7 - ..?
.....
i want to target more than 30 key word using H tag as a header of the paragraph...1 -
Using More Info javascript:toggleDisplay tag for More info text
Is there any harm in using javascript so a user can "toggle" open or closed additional text on a website? For example, if a user wants to read more about something, they can click on "More Info" and the text would then appear. Google is able to read the text, because I chose a random 8 word section of the text within the More Info and pasted it into a Google Search and the website showed up in search results. Just wondering if using this technique would have any negative impact. Here's what the code would look like:
Web Design | | EEE3
<a <span="">title</a><a <span="">="Show Tables" href="</a><a class=" " target="_blank">javascript:toggleDisplay('table1')</a>">More Info style="display: none;" id="table1"> this is where the text would be, and from this section was where I grabbed text to search with in google. Then in the footer, here is the script needed so the more info will work: I am by no means an expert in coding/html/javascript. Thanks!0 -
Anyone used bugherd.com for onsite seo purposes?
Just as the title says, has anyone used bugherd.com for SEO purposes? I was thinking it could be used to show client changes that need to be made regarding the website. Example could be if you are looking at a CRO prospective, you may want to change/add some graphics or text to improve conversions. It seems like a nifty tool to show the changes you want made and to keep track of them. It integrates with basecamp also 🙂
Web Design | | KyleChamp0 -
Thoughts on how to speed up my site? (Other site ideas.)
I was wondering if someone had a few minutes to talk a look at our site and see how to speed it up. I've ran some of the speed tests and I get different results, so I'm not sure if my site would be considered "slow" or not. Also if there any other things that jump out at you (usability, side bar, things I should change / add / take away to make a users experience better, etc.) please let me know. Any feedback is good feedback to me. 🙂 I'm using WP Super Cache as well. Thanks!
Web Design | | NoahsDad1 -
Using H1 Headings - More than 1?
I've known about avoiding the use of more than 1 H1 Heading Tags, however, with HTML5 is this going to change... at least that's how I understand it. According to HTML5 Specs, Each 'section' can have an H1 heading, which at least theoretically means certain web pages that have multiple "sectioning elements" can have more than 1 H1 heading... true? False? What I'm looking for here is some insight into the ramifications HTML5 will have on the use of H1 tags. And would like to know how search engines currently handle this and are they anticipated to change as the HTML5 outline algorithm becomes widely supported? thanks in advance Kelly
Web Design | | KellysTutorials0 -
Using tables in html
I have a question about tables in html.I heard that you shouldnt use tables in html,you should should use css instead.Ive used free html templates that use tables but those tables are styled through css:td,th,table and other table elements are ale styled through css.I'm curious is this ok for SEO or should tables should be dropped altogether? Thanks for your response
Web Design | | PCTechGuy20120