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.
Using GeoDNS across 3 server locations
-
Hi,
I have multiple servers across UK and USA. I have a web site that serves both areas and was looking at cloning my sites and using GeoDNS to route visitors to the closest server to improve speed and experience
So UK visitors would connect to UK dedicated server, North America - New York server and so on
Is this a good way or would this effect SEO negatively.
Cheers
Keith
-
Hi Keith,
I meant the physical bandwidth - i.e. your time. I probably should've been more clear in a technical forum!
For the architecture, there are a few common setups. What I am in the middle of doing here at my company is through Google Cloud services. Duplicating the website app or script (I.e. Wordpress, Ghost, Drupal, CMS, Python App, Rails app, etc) across the several servers and using a load balancer to determine the fastest server. In the app's configuration I am using a single Database server also set up on Google Cloud, so when one server executes a command, it is reflected for all users on all servers. If you're Cron-jobbing all the servers you have set up but no common database, you're going to have some integrity issues, with some servers having some comments or edits, and some servers not.
-
Hi,
I have quite a lot of servers dotted around UK and USA so hosting and bandwidth is no big issue. if I host soley UK the ping times is a whopping 100ms+ to USA and vice versa so this leads me to hosting at least bother countries and latency will be 10-20ms and TTFB nice and low
I like the idea of creating and maintaining one major site as all will be English based, any backlinks will always be pointed to the dot com as opposed to splitting across multiple domains. Seo wise not too bothered will be focusing on speed and entertaining people with info on what they looking for - too me this is more important then the rest
Al servers are Cpanel based, so will try and find a solution to replicate sites in real-time or cron based intervals. this will be the next challenge
If I can pull this off it will be great for other sites I have too
Regards
Keith
-
Personally, I would use the one domain. And from what you've said, you would prefer it as well.
Thankfully, rankings are on a domain basis and not an IP basis, so there would be no issue in the first scenario. If you are duplicating and synchronizing the servers, you are better off using the one domain because you aren't creating two separate websites with differing content (UK English vs US English).
Do you have the bandwidth or ability to produce separate versions (for each domain) for each area you want to target? If not you are best off generalizing your website to target all English users instead of en-US, en-GB, etc. You're going to have to evaluate your geotargeting goals and budget.
-
Hi,
Many thansk for your input
I was planning to use cloudns GeoIP to send visitors to the server of their region.
So having one web site - www.xyz.com that is duplicated across three server (location) so all people see the same site. this would maintain the backlinks and no matter if google crawls from USA or UK it will see it as one domain with exception of 3 IP's in useor have www.xyz.com and www.xyz.co.uk as duplicates and set this in google webmaster tools.
plus set the language en-US and en-UKNot sure which is the best solution. www.xyz.com has the most backlinks and DA, where www.xyz.co.uk has zero and will be new to the world
I would rather people generate backlinks for the one domain as well
Your thoughts are welcome
Regards
Keith
-
The way GeoDNS works is through one of two methods: split DNS or load balancing. The end result is the same, the user will be directed to their closest or fastest available server.
Theoretically, this helps achieves a major goal of technical SEO - great site speed.
With the new Google Web Core Vitals update of this year, site speed and user experience has been further notched up as ranking factors. To get more technical– LCP, largest contentful paint, the speed of which the largest asset on a page loads, and FCP, first contentful paint, the speed of which the first legible content is produced on the screen, are site speed signals used by Google in their ranking algorithm. By connecting a user to the closest/ fastest server available, you can bring down the time on LCP and FCP and thereby increase your rank. The rank change may not be immediately noticeable depending on the competitiveness of your keywords and industry. You can measure these and other variables here: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
In short: No, your SEO won't be negatively impacted, and it will more likely be positively impacted by these optimizations.
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
-
Any crawl issues with TLS 1.3?
Not a techie here...maybe this is to be expected, but ever since one of my client sites has switched to TLS 1.3, I've had a couple of crawl issues and other hiccups. First, I noticed that I can't use HTTPSTATUS.io any more...it renders an error message for URLs on the site in question. I wrote to their support desk and they said they haven't updated to 1.3 yet. Bummer, because I loved httpstatus.io's functionality, esp. getting bulk reports. Also, my Moz campaign crawls were failing. We are setting up a robots.txt directive to allow rogerbot (and the other bot), and will see if that works. These fails are consistent with the date we switched to 1.3, and some testing confirmed it. Anyone else seeing these types of issues, and can suggest any workarounds, solves, hacks to make my life easier? (including an alternative to httpstatus.io...I have and use screaming frog...not as slick, I'm afraid!) Do you think there was a configuration error with the client's TLS 1.3 upgrade, or maybe they're using a problematic/older version of 1.3?? Thanks -
Technical SEO | | TimDickey0 -
Using 2 cache plugin good or not?
Hi, Can anyone tell me - whether using 2 cache plugin helps or it cause any issue? Besides, when i used w3 cache plugin in WordPress its found like inline CSS issue to get cleared. So, i tried auto optimized but my website Soc prollect gone crashed in between while using the some. Is there any solution and can anyone tell me which plugin advantages to speed the site by removing java script and inline css at a time.
Technical SEO | | nazfazy0 -
Best way to link to multiple location pages
I am a Magician and have multiple location pages for each county I cover. I currently have them linked off the menu under locations/ <county>and also in the footer</county> However I have heard that a link from the page is much stronger, so I am experimenting with removing the Menu & Footer link and just linking to these pages from within the content. It's not really a navigation item and most people come in through search to the right page. Am I diluting the link by having it in the Menu/Page and Footer? I read a long time ago that Google only considers the first link to a page and ignores the rest - is that the case? Thanks Roger https://www.rogerlapin.co.uk/
Technical SEO | | Rogerperk0 -
Should I use a canonical URL for images uploaded to a blog post in Wordpress?
Hi, I have a wordpress website that has articles/news posts witch contain imagery. I've noticed that in the Media Library, when you upload an image to a blog post it generates a new permalink ...article-name/article-image-01.jpg I have Yoast SEO plugin and have the option to set a canonical URL for this image. Should I point it back to the actual article? Thanks for any helpers with this.
Technical SEO | | Easigrass0 -
Canonical homepage link uses trailing slash while default homepage uses no trailing slash, will this be an issue?
Hello, 1st off, let me explain my client in this case uses BigCommerce, and I don't have access to the backend like most other situations. So I have to rely on BG to handle certain issues. I'm curious if there is much of a difference using domain.com/ as the canonical url while BG currently is redirecting our domain to domain.com. I've been using domain.com/ consistently for the last 6 months, and since we switches stores on Friday, this issue has popped up and has me a bit worried that we'll loose somehow via link juice or overall indexing since this could confuse crawlers. Now some say that the domain url is fine using / or not, as per - https://moz.com/community/q/trailing-slash-and-rel-canonical But I also wanted to see what you all felt about this. What says you?
Technical SEO | | Deacyde0 -
Links from the same server has value or not
Hi Guys, Sometime ago one of the SEO experts said to me if I get links from the same IP address, Google doesn't count them as with much value. For an example, I am a web devleoper and I host all my clients websites on one server and link them back to me. Im wondering whether those links have any value when it comes to seo or should I consider getting different hosting providers? Regards Uds
Technical SEO | | Uds0 -
Redirect non-www if using canonical url?
I have setup my website to use canonical urls on each page to point to the page i wish Google to refer to. At the moment, my non-www domain name is not redirected to www domain. Is this required if i have setup the canonical urls? This is the tag i have on my index.php page rel="canonical" href="http://www.mydomain.com.au" /> If i browse to http://mydomain.com.au should the link juice pass to http://www.armourbackups.com.au? Will this solve duplicate content problems? Thanks
Technical SEO | | blakadz0 -
How to extract URLs from a site (without bringing the server down!)
Hi everybody. One of my clients is migrating to a new ecommerce platform, and we need to get a list of urls from the existing site to start mapping out the 301 redirects. Usually, I'd use a tool like Xenu or Integrity to crawl and output a list. However, the database and server setup is so bad that it can't handle the requests from these tools and it sends the site down. This, unsurprisingly, is one of the reasons for the migration. Does anybody know of a way to get a full list of urls without having to make a bunch of http requests which will kill the site? Any advice would be much appreciated!
Technical SEO | | neooptic0