International SEO and server hosting
-
I'd appreciate feedback on a situation. We're going through a major overhaul in how we globally manage our websites.
Regional servers were part of our original plan (one in Chicago, UK, and APAC) but we've identified a number of issues with this approach. Although it's considered a best practice among many, the challenges we'd face doing it are considerable (added complexity, added steps and delays to updating sites, among others).
So, we shifted our plan and how are looking at hosting here in the US but to use Akami to deliver images and other heavier data pieces from their local servers (in the UK, etc.). This is how many of the larger companies like Amazon, etc. delivery their global websites.
We hope that using Akami will allow us to have good performance while simplifying our process. Any warning signs we should be aware of? Anyone doing it this way and has a good experience/bad experience?
-
Gerd knows a lot more about CDNs than I do
Yes, you absolutely need to have the CDN content appear as your own subdomain. Standard SEO applies for your image and video content optimization to make sure the content which is now sitting on the subdomain (not your TLD) gets indexed properly.
-
Make sure that your CDN services provide you with domain aliasing - for example if your domain is www.example.com you want your CDN services host-name be part of the domain - i.e. cdnuk.example.com for the UK region.
You will then at least get some value from image crawlers etc. Don't go for any CDN service which does not allow your content to resolve to a subdomain of your primary domain.
SEO does play a role though as the speed of the CDN will affect your overal pagespeed and will also affect how much content a bot will be able to crawl within your allocated crawl quota. The faster your load-time/CDN the more content will be crawled.
I would not bother with localisation tags if your main objective is to optimise performance / page-load time based on your users geo-location.
It looks like you set your mind on Akami, but I would perhaps also evaluate Amazon S3/Cloudfront or Rackspace as those service deliver the same level of SLA but might be more cost-effective for your purposes.
Get your CDN provides to give you a 1-2 month free proof-of-concept (they will only offer this if your traffic is substantial) so that you can try out the service. Never sign up for contracts longer than 12 months, and only sign an annual contract if you receive a large discount. Most CDN companies will charge you for 10 months when signing up for an annual contract.
Also ensure that your CDN provider gives you (near-) or preferably real-time access to statistics and performance reports (you want to see how many requests/sec they have served and what the speed was.
Test your site / CDN via tools such as webpagetest.org or pingdom.com - they have POPs across the globe to simulate remote tests.
-
Thanks for confirming!
-
You don't need to do this anymore. Google uses other signals now to determine what region you should appear in. They understand that someone may choose to host a site in the US rather than some small country for reliability reasons. Just geo-target your sites and you will be fine.
s) and language tag
b) proper language for that region
c) add your local address and contact information to your footer globally if possible
d) geo-target in WMT
Sites like amazon serve their heavier data pieces locally for performance issues, not for SEO.
Same rules apply though with interlinking same owned sites sitting on the same server though.
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
-
70 sites on one instance/server negative for SEO?
Hi Guys, One of our clients is building individual sites for each store they have, which in total would be 70 different websites on one server (they used the word instance). I was wondering if there could be negative issues with this for SEO purposes? Cheers, Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wozniak650 -
Global SEO
Hey there Mozzers! I have a question about global SEO. I have a website that has multiple tlds (.com.au .co.uk .com etc ) Each of these are redirecting depending the user location. Where should my link building be focused on? What are some Global SEO Techniques you suggest ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AngelosS0 -
International Site Migration
Hi guys, In the process of launching internationally ecommerce site (Magento CMS) for two different countries (Australia and US). Then later on expand to other countries like the UK, Canada, etc. The plan is for each country will have its own sub-folder e.g. www.domain.com/us, www.domain.com.au/au, www.domain.com.au/uk A lot of the content between these English based countries are the same. E.g. same product descriptions.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright
So in order to prevent duplication, from what I’ve read we will need to add Hreflang tags to every single page on the site? So for: Australian pages: United States pages: Just wanted to make sure this is the correct strategy (will hreflang prevent duplicate content issues?) and anything else i should be considering? Thankyou, Chris0 -
SSL for SEO?
To obtain an SEO benefit from an SSL is there any particular type or brand which is recommended or has a track history? It seems you can pay anything between $20 and $???? (For that matter whatever you want to pay!). Any experience gratefully accepted! Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
SEO question regarding rails app on www.site.com hosted on Heroku and www.site.com/blog at another host
Hi, I have a rails app hosted on Heroku (www.site.com) and would much prefer to set up a Wordpress blog using a different host pointing to www.site.com/blog, as opposed to using a gem within the actual app. Whats are peoples thoughts regarding there being any ranking implications for implementing the set up as noted in this post on Stackoverflow: "What I would do is serve your Wordpress blog along side your Rails app (so you've got a PHP and a Rails server running), and just have your /blog route point to a controller that redirects to your Wordpress app. Add something like this to your routes.rb: _`get '/blog', to:'blog#redirect'`_ and then have a redirect method in your BlogController that simply does this: _`classBlogController<applicationcontrollerdef redirect="" redirect_to="" "url_of_wordpress_blog"endend<="" code=""></applicationcontrollerdef>`_ _Now you can point at yourdomain.com/blog and it will take you to the Wordpress site._
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Anward0 -
Reviews and Other Content in Tabs and SEO
Hello, We are redesigning our product page and have considered putting our customer reviews in a 'tab' on the page, so it is not visible to the user until they click on the tab. Are there any SEO implications of this? Right now, we do have problems with this because we use a third party tool for our reviews and they are in javascript, so they do not get crawled, but going forward we will be using our native platform. We want the text of the reviews to get crawled and indexed. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Colbys0 -
Seo flash site
Hey. Would hear whether it is possible to SEO a website which is flash site cms?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Agger0 -
Link Age as SEO factor?
Hi Guys
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VividLime
I have a client who ranks well within a competitive sector of the travel industry. They are planning CMS move which will involve changing from .cfm to .aspx We will be doing the standard redirects etc However Matt's statement here on 301 redirects got me thinking
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zW5UL3lzBOA&t=0m24s He says that basically you loose a bit of page rank when you do a 301 redirect. Now, we will be potentially redirecting 1000s of links and my thinking is 'a lot of a little, adds up to a lot' In other words, 1000s of redirects may have a big enough impact to loose some rankings in a very competitive and aggressive space. So recommended that we contact the sites who has the link highest value and ask them to manually change the links from cfm to aspx. This will then mean that there are no loss value as with a 301 redirect. -But now I have another dilemma which I'm unsure about. So the main question:
Is link age factor in rankings ? If I update any links, this will make said link new to Google, so if link age is a factor, would this also lessen the value passed initially?0