Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
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
-
Is there a tool to check the SEO performance of articles from different websites?
Is there a tool to check the SEO performance of articles(like 100+ articles) from different websites in one place? I am looking for a tool where I can put several URLs of the articles we have published in bulk for many of our clients, and it can show me how those articles are performing. This way, we can check the performance of these articles at any time; there is no need to add URLs every time.
Reporting & Analytics | | Foxxr0 -
What is Local SEO in Google Analytics (Organic Source)
Recently, I saw "Local SEO" is mentioned as the organic source. Can someone please tell what is this and from where Google is fetching data for this source?
Reporting & Analytics | | Kevin.Monks0 -
Should Google Trends Match Organic Traffic to My Site?
When looking at Google Trends and my Organic Traffic (using GA) as percentages of their total yearly values I have a correlation of .47. This correlation doesn't seem right when you consider that Google Trends (which is showing relative search traffic data) should match up pretty strongly to your Organic Traffic. Any thoughts on what might be going on? Why isn't Google Trends correlating with Organic Traffic? Shouldn't they be pulling from the same data set? Thanks, Jacob
Reporting & Analytics | | jacob.young.cricut0 -
Google Analytics SEO Queries Not Showing
Hi All, This might be a silly question, but for all the properties I monitor in Google Analytics, I'm now showing no data for SEO Queries under Acquisition for the past 6 days. Normally I would expect a few day delay in queries, but nothing for 6 days is somewhat peculiar especially as it was functioning fine prior to November 12th. Does anyone have insight into what might be going on? Thanks! URaNMa3
Reporting & Analytics | | amichaels0 -
Can you track two Google Analytics Accounts on one site?
If you have a site that had an old analytics account and then implemented a new one is it possible to run tracking code that records to both accounts without causing your site or data issues? We are doing this so we don't loose data at any point - ideally it wouldn't have been split between the two but making one redundant isn't an option. Ideally we would have merged the data from both accounts and had one - however the research we have done points to this not being a possibility - unless one of you guys knows different? It would be great if anyone has experience on any this.. Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | ChrisAllbones0 -
Does a Manual Penalty Affect Other Sites in Same GA Account
Hello Mozzers, I was a bit foolish a couple of years back when first getting into the game, and employed a dodgy agency to do some SEO for me on some sites. Fast forward to this year, and the two sites in my Google Analytics account have been hit with a manual penalty. I decided to ditch the websites and move on, so removed them from my GA account, webmaster tools etc and will simply let them die a death. My question is, do you think this would affect how easy it would be to rank other websites within my GA account? Does anybody have any views on this? Thanks!
Reporting & Analytics | | Marc-FIMA0 -
Why did my site go from 1,000 Impressions to 0 impressions over the past couple days
so we have been doing a lot of reconstruction our website the past couple days with our navigation and moving stuff around. Now bare with me because i am a noob to SEO and i am still learning. But we went from a steady 800-1000 impressions everyday to a 0 since the first. you can check out our site here: www.hidguy.net Not sure if its because we are moving stuff around or what. But we can notice that our conversion rate has dropped and we have had traffic but no conversions and no orders. Is what we are doing bad or is this normal?
Reporting & Analytics | | Dante130 -
Email campaigns. Should I link to my blog or to my site?
I have a client for who we write and post a daily blog article. The articles are optimized and linked to particular targeted content on his top level site. Now we are going to start e-marketing to his 3000+ website users to announce inventory changes and specials. My question is (from a SE standpoint) are we better off linking the e-mail content to the blog and introducing people to the blog (but adding an additional step for getting to the new inventory. Or are we better off putting a link in the HTML E-mail letter that we send out to both the blog and separately to the inventory section? Just to clarify, we wonder if the search engines would provide some additional authority for the extra blog traffic and thereby build the overall score of the blog & site. We are looking at the e-mail campaigns as a potential opportunity to impact SE scores not just awareness of new inventory. Thanks everyone!
Reporting & Analytics | | webindustry0