Proper CDN Implementation
-
I am working with a site that is using the Cloudflare CDN to deliver their images. The problem is that the URLs for the images are all cloudflare URLs (cloudflare.com/example-filename.png). We want to use a cname to change the image URLs to be on a subdomain of their site to take advantage of the SEO strength.
Currently, they get a high percentage of traffic from image search and Google is directing users to their site when returning images hosted on Cloudflare, so I am apprehensive about making changes. I'm curious if anyone has any experience with this or has any insight on how Google will handle it.
Will the longer term benefits out way any short term drop in traffic from image search? WIll there be a drop in image search?
Any thoughts or experiences are appreciated.
Thanks in advance.
-
Hi Lisa
This is interesting.
As far as I can tell, everything is configured 100% correctly.
Few questions:
1. Do you keep all images in /sites/default/files/?
Were all (most) of your errors related to items using that path?2. This could be a downtime issue. Did you experience any availability problems?
3. Do you see any changes in the error report? (different results for the same URL)
If so, this makes my downtime theory more plausible.Also, the site loaded VERY slowly for me.
I've run Google Page speed and saw that you have issue with Cache headers (low expiration date that makes it harder to leverage local and CDN caching capabilities)
This should be looked at. Beyond the immediate ux and seo implications, this can contribute to server load and can be have a negative effect on website's availability. (i.e. the above mentioned downtime)
Best
Igal
-
Igal-
Related question. We just moved to a CDN for our images. Our site is www.mnn.com and our CDN is http://images.mnn.com/. The only thing we’re allowing Google to crawl are the images, so we shouldn’t have any duplicate content issues.
However, what I AM seeing is several thousand warnings in Google Webmaster Tools for our video sitemap. Our video sitemap contains about 618 videos, but we have 2,472 errors citing “Sitemap contains urls which are blocked by robots.txt” which I believe is related to the video icons in search.
When I look for a video in Google, I still see our icons related. I can’t seem to figure this one out.
Any thoughts?
Lisa
-
I`ve recently covered this in a blog post about SEO & CDN Myth busting. The short answer is "No", as Google is well aware of CDN structures.
I think the image traffic drop is un-related and it may have something to do with Bot Blocking features that prevent access from Google Image bot (which, as we recently discovered, can use non-US IPs and thus may also be considered as "fake" ).Having said that, Google official statement says that speed factors only affect 1% of SERP results. If your image traffic is high or/and valuable I would re-think this.
-
The typical way of doing this is to setup a subdomain, specifically for the content that is going to be served from a CDN, and then use a CNAME to map the ugly CDN url to the clean subdomain that you setup. I've only done this with Rackspace and AWS. If you want a good description of how this is done on AWS, see this link:
http://www.labnol.org/internet/setup-content-delivery-network-with-amazon-s3-cloudfront/5446/
Apparently, cloudflare has a way to map your website url to the CDN, as long as you're hosting with a cloud server system that they support. I haven't tried this before, but it might actually be a cleaner way of doing this, if you're hosting setup supports it.
http://blog.cloudflare.com/zone-apex-naked-domain-root-domain-cname-supp
It sounds like this would be a big win for your client, as they get a large percentage of traffic from image traffic. Using a CDN service is going to improve the speed of loading images and reduce their bandwidth bill, and mapping the CNAME should give their domain the credit for being the source of the image.
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
-
Just moved to CDN and site dropped in Google
Hi there, I have been modifying a clients site for months now trying to get higher up in Google for the term "wedding dresses essex" on the website https://www.preciousmomentsbridalwear.co.uk/ It's always ranked around 7th / 8th place and we want to try and get it into 4/5th position ideally. I have optimised pages and then due to the site speed not being that great we moved it to MaxCDN this week which has made the site much faster, but now we have dropped to number 10 in Google and in danger of dropping out of the first page. I was hoping that making the site much faster for desktop and mobile would help not hinder! Any help would be appreciated! Simon
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Doublestruck0 -
How To Implement Breadcrumbs
Hi, I'm looking to implement breadcrumbs for e-commerce store so they will appear in the SERP results like the attached image. In terms of implementing to a site, would you simply add HTML to each page like this Google example? Which looks like this: Books › Science Fiction Award Winners Then is there anything you need to do, to get this showing in the SERPs results e.g. doing something in search console. Or do you just wait into google has crawled and hopefully starts showing in the SERPs results? Cheers. wn3ybMMOQFW98fNQkxtJkA.png [SERP results with bread crumbs](SERP results with bread crumbs)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jaynamarino0 -
Google not Indexing images on CDN.
My URL is: http://bit.ly/1H2TArH We have set up a CDN on our own domain: http://bit.ly/292GkZC We have an image sitemap: http://bit.ly/29ca5s3 The image sitemap uses the CDN URLs. We verified the CDN subdomain in GWT. The robots.txt does not restrict any of the photos: http://bit.ly/29eNSXv. We used to have a disallow to /thumb/ which had a 301 redirect to our CDN but we removed both the disallow in the robots.txt as well as the 301. Yet, GWT still reports none of our images on the CDN are indexed.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alphonsehaThe above screenshot is from the GWT of our main domain.The GWT from the CDN subdomain just shows 0. We did not submit a sitemap to the verified subdomain property because we already have a sitemap submitted to the property on the main domain name. While making a search of images indexed from our CDN, nothing comes up: http://bit.ly/293ZbC1While checking the GWT of the CDN subdomain, I have been getting crawling errors, mainly 500 level errors. Not that many in comparison to the number of images and traffic that we get on our website. Google is crawling, but it seems like it just doesn't index the pictures!?
Can anyone help? I have followed all the information that I was able to find on the web but yet, our images on the CDN still can't seem to get indexed.
0 -
Implementing AMP pages on WordPress blog
Hey Moz Users, Has anyone tried using the WordPress plugin for AMP pages on their blog yet? Here's the link to it: https://wordpress.org/plugins/amp/. The implementation seems pretty straightforward but since there will be an AMP and a mobile friendly version of the posts on my blog I'm worried it will create a lot of duplicate content issues. I've seen a lot of articles pointing to a rel canonical tag that can be used to fix this situation. Not sure if I'm going to have an AMP version of all the posts on my blog, so this seems like it would be a pain to place the tag manually on specific pages with the AMP version only. Has anyone tried this plugin and what have you done to fix this duplicate content issue? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | znotes0 -
Duplicate content across similar computer "models" and how to properly handle it.
I run a website that revolves around a niche rugged computer market. There are several "main" models for each computer that also has several (300-400) "sub" models that only vary by specifications for each model. My problem is I can't really consolidate each model to one product page to avoid duplicate content. To have something like a drop down list would be massive and confusing to the customer when they could just search the model they needed. Also I would say 80-90% of the market searches for a specific model when they go to purchase or in Google. A lot of our customers are city government, fire departments, police departments etc. they get a list of approved models and purchase off that they don't really search by specs or "configure" a model so each model number having a chance to rank is important. Currently we have all models in each sub category rel=canonical back to the main category page for that model. Is there a better way to go about this? Example page you can see how there are several models all product descriptions are the same they only vary by model writing a unique description for each one is an unrealistic possibility for us. Any suggestions on this would be appreciated I keep going back on forth on what the correct solution would be.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | The_Rugged_Store0 -
What is the proper way to write a title for local SEO?
Good Morning, I was wondering if some one could clarify the best way to write a title tag for local SEO. 1.) "Pet Store in Boston, MA" or 2.) "Boston, MA Pet Store" Thank!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Charles_Murdock0 -
Proper sitemap update frequency
I have 12 sitemaps submitted to Google. After about a week, Google is about 50% of the way through crawling each one. In the past week I've created many more pages. Should I wait until Google is 100% complete with my original sitemaps or can I just go ahead and refresh them? When I refresh the original files will have different URLs.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jcgoodrich0 -
Two pages on same domain - Is this a proper use of the canonical tag?
I have a domain with two pages in question--one is an article with 2,000 words and the other is a FAQ with 300 words. The 300 word FAQ is copied, word-for-word and pasted inside of the 2,000 word article. Would it be a proper use of the canonical tag to point the smaller, 300 word FAQ at the 2,000 word article? Since the 300 word article is identical to a portion of the 2,000 word article, will Google see this as duplicate content? Thanks in advance for any helpful insight.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andrewv0