CDN for SEO (or not)?
-
Does CDN impact on SEO or not?
There seems conflicting ideas as to whether they impact positively or negatively, I realise that if the page loads quicker this is a good thing for SEO and usability of course.
Does Google see CDN as just cheating and a get-around for not doing the work from the ground up and using good hosting etc?
Do you have any direct experience?
All constructive input much appreciated!
-
Thank you, Dirk.
I always enjoy getting explicit answers from people who I have grown to trust.
Thanks!
-
I doubt that Google is seeing using a CDN as cheating - it is one of the factors which helps increasing the speed of the site and increase user experience. It would be an ideal world if you could get a 100% score on Pagespeed Insights and all A scores on webpagetest.org - but you have to start somewhere, and adding a CDN is normally one of the easier things to do. So it's certainly not cheating - rather taking a step in the good direction.
Apart from that, Google is offering a CDN itself (https://cloud.google.com/dns/docs).
rgds,
Dirk
-
Hi Egol,
You can mask the url of the CDN behind your own url - so rather than displaying d3vam04na8c92l.cloudfront.net/imagename.jpg (the example is Cloudfront but it's possible for most CDN's) it could be something like images.mysite.com/imagename.jpg - so links to these pages would still be beneficial to your domain rather than the cdn.
Dirk
-
I like the answer given by Nitin. I agree with the speed benefits and that has tempted me to consider CDNs.
I also have a question to toss out....
Let's imagine that I have a site with very popular images or very popular pdf, ppt, doc, etc files. If those are on my domain then google can easily see that popular images in image search are associated with my domain. Also if people embed my images or hotlink my images or link to my pdf ppt doc, etc files then google can see that activity and popularity is associated with my domain.
Many sites have enormous investments beyond typical webpages. Google does rank pdf ppt doc etc files. They accumulate pagerank and have the ability to pass link benefits. In addition, they can build brand mention popularity, as an example, people can say... "Look at this great photo on egol.com" and that mention, I believe, can provide ranking benefit, advertising value for your domain. If people who find your image or other document instead say... "Look at this great photo on xyz123cdn.com" then that strips those benefits from my domain. It strips type-in traffic from my domain.
Does anyone know of any testing or statements from Google that address how image and information files work when used on CDN.
-
Hi,
Generally, people advice to use CDN for serving static content very fast on your site, that helps you improve your page speed and hence, there it adds value from SEO & UX perspective.
Now, the definition of CDN will help you understand how exactly it can help you improve your page speed. So, here you go:
"A CDN is essentially a network of geographically dispersed servers. Each CDN node (also called Edge Servers) caches the static content of a site like the images, CSS/JS files and other structural components. The majority of an end-user's page load time is spent on retrieving this content, and so it makes sense to provide these "building blocks" of a site in as many server nodes as possible, distributed throughout the world.
When a user requests your site, the node closest in proximity to user will deliver the static content, ensuring the shortest distance for the data to travel (reduced latency), therefore providing the fastest site experience."
Also, check the attached image to understand it well. Hope this helps
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 an iframe redirect on the same Domain bad for SEO
Good morning. We have a vendor that has created a landing page with content that we want to use. Because of the way we built the site, the only way to use the content is to create an i-frame. The i-frame is re-directingon the same Domain. Would we benefit from the SEO Content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jdenbo_edf0 -
Is hidden content bad for SEO?
I am using this plugin to enable Facebook comments on my blog:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | soralsokal
https://wordpress.org/plugins/fatpanda-facebook-comments/ This shows the comment in an Facebook iFrame. The plugin author claims it's SEO friendly, because the comments are also integrated in the WordPress database. The are included in the post but hidden. Is that bad for SEO?0 -
SEO Checklist for eCommerce?
Over the past week or so, my eCommerce site has experienced a large drop in organic traffic from Google.I have used analytics to determine that the pages that have seen the biggest losses in traffic are product pages. I know there are so many seo checklists/site audit checklists out there recommending different things, but does anyone have a good checklist (or link to a good checklist) that would fit our situation best? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gordian0 -
The use of subdomains to improve SEO?
A clients website which provide a number of trade services which have a page for each service they provide for example: carpentry or electrician or plumbing etc. currently these pages are found at domain.co.uk/bathrooms/ bathrooms.html I am trying to optmise each page better as they are competing with other sites who for example sell bathrooms rather than bathroom installers or plumbers. As part of the on page optimisation I plan to change the page names and directory structure. I had an idea to split the website down into subdomains for various sections i.e for all their services Create a sub domain such as http://plumber.domain.co.uk 2.) upload the relevant content (in this example the plumbing page) to the sub domain location 3.) correct all the links to absolute URLs for each sub domain / Will this help target better use of keywords in the URL in terms of SEO efforts ? hope it makes sense thanks Darren
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bristolweb0 -
Google Adsense Good for SEO?
Is there any merit to the statement that Google will give some SEO value to sites that display Adsense? Or is there absolutely no SEO value for or against a site that displays Adsense Ads? Clearly, it would benefit Google's finance to give at least a small boost to sites that display Adsense, but do they do it? My guess is no, but I'm wondering ...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | applesofgold0 -
Disabled/Accessibilty vs SEO?
Can anyone point me to resources that helps website owners balance these two issues? Or how to SEO a site meant for disabled users? or how to make an SEO'd site more accessible? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mjcarrjr0 -
Expiring URL seo
a buddy of mine is running a niche job board and is having issues with expiring URLs. we ruled it out cuz a 301 is meant to be used when the content has moved to another page, or the page was replaced. We were thinking that we'd be just stacking duplicate content on old urls that would never be 'replaced'. Rather they have been removed and will never come back. So 410 is appropriate but maybe we overlooked something. any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | malachiii0