Using a third party server to host site elements
-
Hi guys -
I have a client who are recently experiencing a great deal of more traffic to their site. As a result, their web development agency have given them a server upgrade to cope with the new demand.
One thing they have also done is put all website scripts, CSS files, images, downloadable content (such as PDFs) - onto a 3rd party server (Amazon S3). Apparently this was done so that my clients server just handles the page requests now - and all other elements are then grabbed from the Amazon s3 server. So basically, this means any HTML content and web pages are still hosted through my clients domain - but all other content is accessible through an Amazon s3 server URL.
I'm wondering what SEO implications this will have for my clients domain? While all pages and HTML content is still accessible thorugh their domain name, each page is of course now making many server calls to the Amazon s3 server through external URLs (s3.amazonaws.com).
I imagine this will mean any elements sitting on the Amazon S3 server can no longer contribute value to the clients SEO profile - because that actual content is not physically part of their domain anymore. However what I am more concerned about is whether all of these external server calls are going to have a negative effect on the web pages value overall. Should I be advising my client to ensure all site elements are hosted on their own server, and therefore all elements are accessible through their domain?
Hope this makes sense (I'm not the best at explaining things!)
-
Hello Zeal Digital,
I use a CDN (Content Delivery Network) for images, CSS and javascript.
Doing that adds only about $10 to cost per month for a site that had around 800,000 pageviews per month.
You have complete control over the images. If there is a problem, you can force the CDN to flush a file and reload it from the source. You add code to your .htaccess file that tells the CDN how long to store images before fluching them and getting a new copy. It is all automated, there is generally no work for you to do. I host with softlayer.com and this is part of their service.
The change from self-sourced images, css and scripts had a massive improvement on the server.
- it is a 16-processor linux box with twin 15,000rpm SCSI drives and 12Gb RAM - it is quite fast!
Page delivery times improved by 1-2 seconds.
The server now is so lightly loaded that it could be downgraded to save more money.
It has zero effect on SEO. The CDN is accessed using a CNAME.
- static.domain.com - so don't worry about it looking like components are from other places.
The CDN has servers all over the world, so no matter where the visitors are, it is only a few hops for them to get most of the content, making it much faster for someone in Australia who would normally pull images from a server in the USA.
Your only problem with Amazon S3 is that they have crashed it a few times, but other than that, it is a good thing to do.
I wouldn't advise them to self-host, unless you want to increase their costs, server loading and page delivery times.
-
Great advice, cheers Jeffery!
-
I work with a number of high traffic sites (TB's of data each day, 10's millions page views/month). With many of these sites, we have offloaded static content to either dedicated static content servers (typically cloud based so we can scale up and down) or to content deliver networks. I've not had anyone report any SEO impact.
In contrast, they often see user engagement (page views/user), repeat visitors, and other traffic metrics improve. Users like fast sites. Also, Google apparently likes fast sites too, so while I've not seen it, you could actually get a boost in your SERPs due to faster loading pages.
If you break down a modern web page, you will find numerous elements required. Dozens of images, CSS, javascript as well as the page itself. All of these items require a request to the web server.
With some graphic intensive sites, I've seen as much as 95% of all web server requests (HTTP requests) be attributable to static content. By moving these HTTP requests to other systems, you free your primary server to handle the application. This provides a better user experience and improves scalability.
Content Delivery Networks
I do not use Amazon's Web Services so I do not know specifically what they offer. But here are two CDN's Ihave used with good success:
Internap:
http://www.internap.com/cdn-services-content-delivery-network/
Edgecast:
One method I look for is called "origin pull." With this method, you do not have to upload files to the CDN. The CDN will fetch them automatically from your site as needed. I found this is much easier to manage on sites that have frequent content updates.
-
Hosting images externally never had any impact on cases I had a chance to observe. The only problem I can think of is that you lose control over loading times or if somebody takes an image and links (credits) the image hosting domain instead of your domain.
-
Couple of notes for you
- There isn't any SEO impact on WHERE the data is loaded from. Look at any major website (especially one that ranks well) and they're openly using content delivery (like Akamai, Amazon S3/Cloudfront, etc) for static content. This is good business practice because it takes that load off your web server and often places the content closer to where the client is. Faster content delivery can help SEO if you have a slow server.
- If they're using the raw S3 buckets I would HIGHLY suggest signing up for Cloudfront. There's two benefits to doing this. First, you put the content into Amazon's cloud, where it is more readily available. Second, you can use domain aliasing to help obscure the source. For instance, let's say you have an images bucket. You could add a CNAME DNS record for images.yourdomain.com and then put that into your source code. You can still see where the DNS takes you, but it's not obvious to the general public. The cost difference between raw S3 delivery and Cloudfront is negligible.
Oh, and I use Amazon Cloudfront for my delivery. Never had any SEO issues with doing so.
-
I don't recomend to have the resources and database to other server than files, it makes some flood traffic between servers, the resources are harder to load and the site optimum speed is decreased. Also you can't compress this content so they are downloaded independently.
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
-
Migration + Change of Address Tool used - previous site de-indexed!!
OMG disaster! Recently migrated my site womencycles.com to moonrise.health. Painstakingly went through each URL manually to map out redirects, notified Google via change of address tool. Bam. My old website has disappeared from Google and my new site has thus lost all it's organic (i.e. redirected) traffic. I don't get it. I think I have done everything by the book, but it seems my old site has disappeared and no authority or link juice has been passed to my new site by the 301s, as the new site isn't ranking either. Some examples: https://www.google.com/search?q=women+cycles&oq=women+cycles&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i65j69i61l2j69i60.1834j0j1&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 'women cycles' previous position 1
Technical SEO | | tikitaka
https://www.google.com/search?q=chaffed+vagina&oq=chaffed+vagina&aqs=chrome..69i57.2370j0j1&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 - chaffed vagina, previous position 1 https://www.google.com/search?q=how+long+does+it+take+turmeric+to+shrink+fibroids&oq=how+long+does+it+take+turmeric+to+shrink+fibroids&aqs=chrome..69i57.1355j0j1&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 - how long does it take turmeric to shrink fibroids, previous position 1. Biggest traffic source pages were: https://womencycles.com/blog/top-10-home-remedies-that-claim-to-tighten-vagina-do-they-work/
https://womencycles.com/blog/sore-breasts-after-period-has-finished/
https://womencycles.com/blog/what-is-vaginal-gas-queefing/
https://womencycles.com/blog/tired-during-ovulation/
https://womencycles.com/blog/how-to-get-rid-of-saggy-vag-without-surgery/
https://womencycles.com/blog/vagina-chafing-causes-treatments-to-prevent-it-from-coming-back/
https://womencycles.com/blog/vaginal-dryness-during-pregnancy/ New blog articles on new site, with 301 redirect in place, but not ranking Screenshot shows my search traffic for my new site. Site migrated 13 June. Any ideas anyone??!Screenshot 2022-06-28 at 13.27.41.png0 -
Unique use of nofollow tag
Love the community here. I just had a quick question about the using noindex, nofollow. We are a car dealership group that uses a website provider (cobalt). Since they provide the website they are the only ones with access to remove pages etc. We can add pages but only they can remove them. There are some pages we need to have removed but according to them they are unable to remove them, (I think the manufacture might mandate having some pages), anyway some of these pages literally have nothing on them, and there isn't really any useful content we could add to them. So we are using noindex on them to ensure that they stay out of search indices, but I am wondering if we should also use nofollow on them. If I understand nofollow correctly it just means search engines won't follow the links on the page, well for most of these pages the only links on them are the navigation, and since we don't plan on adding any content to these pages and we can't remove them should we use noindex and nofollow as a way to "remove" them from the site as much as we can?
Technical SEO | | Murdock_Auto_Group0 -
Switching site from http to https. Should I do entire site?
Good morning, As many of you have read, Google seems to have confirmed that they will give a small boost to sites with SSL certificates this morning. So my question is, does that mean we have to switch our entire site to https? Even simple information pages and blog posts? Or will we get credit for the https boost as long as the sensitive parts of our site have it? Anybody know? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | rayvensoft1 -
Will Links to one Sub-Domain on a Site hurt a different Sub-Domain on the same site by affecting the Quality of the Root Domain?
Hi, I work for a SaaS company which uses two different subdomains on our site. A public for our main site (which we want to rank in SERPs for), and a secure subdomain, which is the portal for our customers to access our services (which we don't want to rank for) . Recently I realized that by using our product, our customers are creating large amounts of low quality links to our secure subdomain and I'm concerned that this might affect our public subdomain by bringing down the overall Authority of our root domain. Is this a legitimate concern? Has anyone ever worked through a similar situation? any help is appreciated!
Technical SEO | | ifbyphone0 -
Redirects in site map
I have a site with the ace/sef ( creates friendly URLS) in a large data base site. It creates a site map dynamically. Yet I realize one issue which I am trying to think through. I recently changed my urls to include an ID number example: homepage/houses/1134-big-blue-house The prior url was: homepage/houses/big-blue-house the original url above redirects to the new one with the ID like I want. However the site map has both URLS in it which go to same page I am not sure but it seems rather stupid to have the new URL and OLD redirected URL in the site map. Yet beside stupid I am wondering if this is duplicate content and will cause a penalty from the google bot. What is your opinion ?
Technical SEO | | aimiyo0 -
What keywords should i be using to promote my site
Hi i am looking to promote my home page which is a lifestyle magazine www.in2town.co.uk and i am not sure what keywords i should be using to promote it. I am doing ok for the keyword lifestyle magazine but i am struggling on what other keywords i should be using to get people to the home page of the magazine. The magazine is nearly finished and we still have a couple of finishing touches to do but the basics of the magazine is as follows holiday and travel news, soap gossip, celebrity gossip, product reviews, lingerie brands, gastric band hypnotherapy, health, fashion and beauty and holiday reviews. I want the home page to be the main page where everyone visits but i am not sure what i should be doing to accomplish this. Any ideas would be of a great help
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Used SEOMOZ top 100 Directories, my site ranking lowered, what can we do to fix this?
We have made a big mistake.... So what can we do to fix this? A trainee member of staff has used the seomoz 100 top directories and added to sites from PR10 to PR6 approx about 25 sites, using keywords were possible instead of using the website URL "which i now was stupid!. Our website ranking have been lowered big time for all keywords used!, eg from 1st to 10th and even disappeared from the top 100 We are contacting all directories asking for the Title link to be changed to the URL instead of a keyword.. Will this help? I understand that Google give sites a penalty for this!!, but what can i do to put this right and how long would this penalty last for? Any advice would be highly appreciated... Thanks Dean
Technical SEO | | deanpallatt0