SEO dealing with a CDN on a site.
-
This one is stumping me and I need some help. I have a client who's site is www.site.com and we have set them up a CDN through Max CDN at cdn.site.com which is basically a cname to the www.site.com site. The images in the GWT for www.site.com are de-indexing rapidly and the images on cdn.site.com are not indexing. In the Max CDN account I have the images from cdn.site.com sending a canonical header from www.site.com but that does not seem to help, they are all still de-indexing.
-
In my experience Google does a pretty good job of applying the rankings to the CDN version of the image if you follow those best practices.
Good luck!
-
They were being de-indexed until I did this, http://moz.com/community/q/would-this-be-considered-cloaking-and-would-it-be-a-bad-move
The images are not dynamic at all, they have static urls. The only thing that was being changes was the sub domain from www to cdn. When that happened the images started to de-index on the www sub domain, even though the cdn sub domain image had a canonical header pointing back to the www domain. You are welcome to check it out in action, the site is https://www.redwrappings.com.au/
-
Very odd, then, that they're being removed from the index. Do you think it's possible that the images have different URLs depending on which server they're cached on? That could definitely do it. I'd have a friend across the country pull them up and see if the image URL changes.
I'm assuming that the image has some dynamic characters on it, which is pretty common with CDNs under certain configurations. Unfortunately, I've never used MaxCDN. If the image is just cdn.site.com/image.png - I'm afraid I have absolutely no idea why they wouldn't be re-indexed. I have similar CDN images that pull in fine.
-
That article touches on a lot of the issues. Here are my thoughts and you can tell me if I am incorrect in my thinking. For a couple of years the images have been on the www part of the domain, now they are on a CDN sub directory. I was trying to keep them indexed under the www part of domain so that they would keep the authority of the domain. My thoughts were if they are de-indexed under the www and re-indexed under the cdn they would have to climb their way back in the image search rankings. Basically that is what I was trying to avoid.
-
They are static. It is a passthrough CDN that basically strips off the www of the image url and replaces it with cdn.
-
Hello Lesley,
Here is an article that may help, or provide some links to other resources at the bottom: Four Best Practices for Using a CDN .
Are you keeping the same filenames or do those change?
What is in the robots.txt file on the CDN?
Have you set up and verified the CDN in Google Webmaster Tools? If so, have you submitted an XML Sitemap?
-
Hi there,
Could you tell me whether the URLs on your images are static on the CDN sub-domain? Or do they change regularly?
-
Christy,
Sure thing, this is what is in place now, http://moz.com/community/q/would-this-be-considered-cloaking-and-would-it-be-a-bad-move
-
Thanks for the update, Lesley. I'm sorry to hear that you haven't found a solution you're happy with. Let me see if any of the other Associates can help you troubleshoot this. In the meantime, are you able to to share the details of your workaround?
Christy
-
None of the answers really applied. I did a work around that I am not too happy with at the current time.
-
Hi Lesley, what is the current status of this issue? Were you able to resolve it, or are you still having problems? We'd love an update, thanks!
Christy
-
I have not actually set up the robots.txt in maxcdn. But the cdn is not indexing, which is what I am wanting, doing the site: search for the cdn shows no results. For the main site though the images are falling out of the index, even though there is a site map for them and they are still accessible from their normal url.
-
I am not using Wordpress, the site is using PrestaShop, so it does not have those plugins.
This is how it is set up.
cdn.site.com is a cname of www.site.com so images are accessible from www.site.com/image.jpg and cdn.site.com/image.jpg but when they are served from the cdn.site.com/image.jpg they have the canonical header that points to www.site.com/image.jpg I cannot understand why that would de-index all of the images on www.site.com though
-
I had this problem.
Are you using W3 Total Cache... if so you should activate the Yoast SEO extension (presumably you use Yoast, and their sitemaps). You will find it at Performance -> Extensions in the W3 Total Cache admin area.
In addition, with the robots file in Maxcdn you should have something like:
User-agent: *
Disallow:/
Allow: /wp-content/
Allow: /wp-includes/You will find this under the SEO settings of your Pull zone in MaxCDN. Make sure you have robots & canonical header ticked as well.
The W3 Total cache extension will sort all the sitemap problems with pointing to the right URL and canonical. There is no need to do anything manually as some of the articles suggest.
-
I have no problem helping you look into this. I can play with it more tomorrow morning. I have a few more questions though. Did you setup the robots.txt in MaxCDN to point to the origin directory of the images? What happens when you search site:cdn.domain.com or site:www.domain.com in Google?
There are a few ideas that I have into why this is happening but I would like to test them prior to posting.
-
It is a pull zone.
-
Are you currently using a "Pull" or "Push" zone on MaxCDN?
-
That is actually what has been done, I have seen the article before. But there are two issues, one they are not indexing and it has been a couple of weeks. But the more major issue to me is that using the cdn url none of the link juice from the main domain is being passed to the cdn sub domain. I am trying to figure out why Google is not respecting the canonical header for the images. It would seem to me, that according to what Matt Cutts says that it would. But it is not.
-
I have had this issue in past as well when working with MaxCDN. I was able to apply a fix using some of the methods in this article to fix the issue.
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
-
Question on structuring URLs in a Drupal CMS - Adverse SEO or Analytics impacts?
Hello Moz Community, We're building out a health system (think a bunch of hospitals and clinics etc.) website on Drupal for the first time. Nebraskamed.com is our domain. Because we're using nodes instead of pages, our URL structure can pretty much be whatever we think makes sense. Our proposal is to drop /blog/ and related terms from the URL structure, because it doesn't really mean anything to the user. Instead, we'd use the service line "cancer" for example, followed by the name of the blog post or document. Example: nebraskamed.com/cancer/10-bone-cancer-myths Do you see any red flags (perhaps with SEO or Analytics for example) to what I'm proposing? domain name/service line/blog-post-name If so, do you have a URL structure you advise?
Reporting & Analytics | | Patrick_at_Nebraska_Medicine1 -
Multiple GA codes, one site.
Hi all, Is anyone running two GA codes on one website successfully? My organisation own a number of websites so we used to have one global GA code on all our sites to track global stats, and then we would also have site unique GA on each property to just track that one property. This worked fine, but of late we seem to be getting no data from the globally based code. Obviously, with the site-specific codes we can enter the name for that domain in GA but for the overall code, it is called 'all.com' I'm wondering if Google has now tied the GA domain to the code or if we are doing something wrong. All the codes are the same as they always were but have stopped working. As a stop gap, we have swapped to using Piwik as the all.com code. However, we are then comparing the stats in two different analytics programs so will get a different result. Also, it would be nice to be able to add the all.com to tools such as this to generate weekly reports. Anyone else having GA woe like this? Thanks. Carl
Reporting & Analytics | | WonkyDog0 -
Why are these sites outranking me?
I've been hit by every update and have spent thousands of $ and hundreds of hours trying to survive. Survival looks doubtful if I can't get turned around in 4 weeks or less. I have found adwords and google errors and fixed them. Alexa says us-nano.com is the best ranked site. I used my moz bar and they are doing everything wrong, keyword stuffing, no H1's tags, poor design. How are they ranking & I'm not? My duplicate meta tags are from this week when I added alexa and bing ID's to my header to verify my site ownership. http://imgur.com/a/I1bsw I1bsw
Reporting & Analytics | | cheaptubes0 -
How do I track a primary domain and a subdomain as single site in Google Analytics?
Our website consists of a primary domain (marketing focused) and subdomain (ecommerce platform). The two sites look and function as one site even though they are using different technology. I would like to track the primary domain (example.com) and the subdomain (shop.example.com) as a single site in Google Analytics. The subdomain will be set up with GA ecommerce tracking as well. Can someone provide an example of the GA snippet that each would need?
Reporting & Analytics | | Evan340 -
Free Media Site / High Traffic / Low Engagement / Strategies and Questions
Hi, Imagine a site "mediapalooza dot com" where the only thing you do there is view free media. Yet Google Analytics is showing the average view of a media page is about a minute; where the average length of media is 20 - 90 minutes. And imagine that most of this media is "classic" and that it is generally not available elsewhere. Note also that the site ranks terribly in Google, despite having decent Domain Authority (in the high 30's), Page Authority in the mid 40's and a great site and otherwise quite active international user base with page views in the tens of thousands per month. Is it possible that GA is not tracking engagement (time on site) correctly? Even accounting for the imperfect method of GA that measures "next key pressed" as a way to terminate the page as a way to measure time on page, our stats are truly abysmal, in the tenths of a percentage point of time measured when compared with actual time we think the pages are being used. If so, will getting engagement tracking to more accurately measure time on specif pages and site signal Google that this site is actually more important than current ranking indicates? There's lots of discussion about "dwell time" as this relates to ranking, and I'm postulating that if we can show Google that we have extremely good engagement instead of the super low stats that we are reporting now, then we might get a boost in ranking. Am I crazy? Has anyone got any data that proves or disproves this theory? as I write this out, I detect many issues - let's have a discussion on what else might be happening here. We already know that low engagement = low ranking. Will fixing GA to show true engagement have any noticeable impact on ranking? Can't wait to see what the MOZZERS think of this!
Reporting & Analytics | | seo_plus0 -
What are all the 5's in SEO Queries in Analytics?
Every small business client has the same thing. 5 impressions for keywords, row after row, every single month. Why exactly 5 and why month after month the same thing? I see this in every local business I work in - and for very important phrases! It's gotten to the point that I think those are fake and I just look at the impressions that have numbers great than 5. Obviously I have to get their impressions up, but what am I to believe about these?
Reporting & Analytics | | katandmouse0 -
Are organic search visitors always seen as organic in origin, even if their return to the site is direct?
Many of our conversions occur in a customers second visit to the site. Often, a customer will arrive at our site, submit a finance application, leave, and return at a later date to checkout. We are interested in tracking how many of our checkouts come from customers who originally found our site through an organic search result. If a customer enters the site through organic search, leaves, and returns later through an email link or directly entering our URL, will G analytics show that customer as direct or organic origin? Cheers, Ben
Reporting & Analytics | | WSPL0 -
What extra shall we do to increase organic traffic for both the sites?
One of my clients has english language websites targeted for USA and UK audience with some content variations but60%-70% of the content on site remains the same. The site is hosted in USA. One is hosted on brandname.co.uk and one is on brandname.com. The precuations that we have already taken to save it from being marked duplicates are: 1. used rel=alternate element for all product detail pages2. currency in both the sites are different that is GBP and USD3. have tried to differenttate the product by using different product specific terms like Publishing Year: vis a vis published in:Author Vis a vis Written byFormat vis a vis binding type Add to cart vis a vis add to basket and so on What remains the same: 1. Title structure 2. Description 3. Product Name 4. About the product text
Reporting & Analytics | | CyrilWilson0