Thoughts on using a CDN?
-
I'm trying to decide if I should use a CDN to speed up my site. I've never used one before, but I do know that there are a lot of images on my site and I think that could help a great deal.
Are they hard to set up? Are there any down sides? And are the pricey?
Also I'm not sure even sure if it would make a difference for me, but I want to work on getting my site faster.
Thanks.
-
This in no way endorses or not any one cdn but I will share what has happened to me over the last few months.
My hosting company gave me the option of using a well known cdn free with my hosting package. Now as my site is hosted in the US and most of my visitors are from the UK I thought that would be a good idea. So end of August I enable the cdn for my site.
From mid sept the time it took googlebot to crawl an individual page on my site went up from average 150ms to over 4000ms. The number of pages crawled per day remain the same.
However looking at the index status the number of pages not selected has increase by some 30% when I have not been adding any content to the site.
At end of Sept for most of my page my ranking fell by about 950 places. There were no messages in WMT and a reconderation request came back saying no manual penalty.
At the end of Oct I disable the CDN and immeadiately the time googlebot took on each page fell back down to the 150ms mark. Rankings are yet to improve so I am not saying this was the only cause of the drop in rankings.
I am now getting a lot of 404 not found appearing in my wmt crawl errors for pages that have never exisited on my site but have no mention of the cdn in them either.
I am talking with the cdn provider at the moment so have not named them here.
-
Hi, I work at Incapsula and I've just recently wrote a 2 part Blog Post that look and CDN from a SEO point-of-view. The first post deals with SEO & CDN Myths and the second one covered CDN related SEO Benefits. I hope you`ll find this helpful.
Admittedly, I do work for a CDN provider, but I also have 7+ year of prior SEO experience (both as Freelancer, Senior Adviser, CTO and SEO/SEM Department Manager) and so, in my post, I insisted on conduction balanced discussion, using only Google official statements to prove my point.
Hope this helps.
-
I've just signed upto http://www.incapsula.com/
It was the most pain free setup compared to another I have tried.
They have various versions available. Also stopped all my spam registrations!
-
i used amazon cdn and was not impressed with the service but i have been told there are some good ones out there, it is just finding the good ones.
-
No problem. Be sure to let me know if you end up trying one.
-
I was suspicious that it might cause a rankings problem. Thanks for sharing what you read.
I would like to read an evaluation of the service done by a top SEO with deep technical knowledge. What happens when you start bouncing every visitor from a high traffic country? Will I lose image search traffic when my files are modified out to their service? What else do they add to my site or change? Sucking any linkjuice?
-
Yah, I read up on CloudFrare, but it looks like a lot of people don't like them / suggest them. Some people even saying they lost a lot of rankings after using them.
-
I was looking at CloudFlare.
I wanted to speed up the site, limit access to certain countries, and get some of their security enhancements.
The cost can be free if you use minimal services or $20/month if you want a lot more.
I didn't do it because I had some concerns about their use of my data, how they might rewrite URLs on my site with affiliate codes, how blocking certain countries might impact search rankings, and more.
I really like their services but have research to do before I decide that it is a good thing for me.
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
-
Should i be using shortcodes for my my page content.
Hello, I have a question. Sorry if this is been answered before. Recently I decided to do a little face lift to my main website pages. I wanted to make my testimonials more pretty. Found this great plugin for testimonials which creates shortcodes. I love how it looks like, but just realised that when I use images in shortcodes, these are not picked up by search engines 😞 only text is. Image search ability is pretty important for me and I'm not sure if I should stick with my plain design and upload images manually with all alt tags and title tags or there is a way to adjust shortcode so it shows images to search engines. You can see example here. https://a-fotografy.co.uk/maternity-photographer-edinburgh/ Let me know your thoughts guys. Regards, Armands
Web Design | | A_Fotografy1 -
Why use a wwwP subdomain naming convention
While working through a series of crawl reports and competitive insights for a site, I noticed one of the competitors had switched from a WWW-version to a wwwP-version. Looking back at the snapshot I took of this during the same time period in 2014, I noticed a significant drop in PA/DA by 20+/-. I'm curious to know if anybody else has experienced something similar, and if anybody can provide insights on why a change like this would even be made? I'll preface it with, everything we could see that this competitor was doing from the outside, was legitimate and propelling them in a positive direction.
Web Design | | dodgejd0 -
Google Translate with "no-follow" just for users' use, no ranking
Hello, I tried to search but here is a little unique situation. I would like to translate my website in 2-3 different languages not for ranking purpose, but only for some minority users within Italy to understand the content in their native language. Using "no-follow" with a Google Translate link would damage SEO? if not I would like to use it. Here are few points: Give users the ability to switch the content to their language with a link Tell Google not to follow the translated pages, because I don't want them to be used for ranking or searches I would start simply with Google Translate to see if people actually are interested, then later translate by human but still don't want google to follow I could also start with human translation instead of Google Translate if really needed, I know it is a no no. What I'm very interested is to make sure that those pages under "no-follow" won't affect my SEO in good or bad right now, because we would like to keep as it is. Thanks a lot
Web Design | | angelowei0 -
After a website redesign, what is the impact and is it a good practice to use /v2/ naming convention?
Hi mightyful SEOMoz community. We just launched a redesign of our commercial website from https://www.data-field.com to https://www.data-field.com/v2/ All URLs from previous website were 301 permanent redirect to the appropriate page in the new website, and the root domains ( /, /v2/ ) send the users to their own language content /v2/en/, /v2/fr/, /v2/zh/ Up to here everything is fine. But then I setup the usual "Share" buttons, only to find that they were displaying a "0" count. Then I realized that it was because of the root URL change from / to /v2/ My question is the following: 1. Is using /v2/ a good practice? 2. If yes, then should I link the Social tool to https://www.data-field.com/ ( only ) instead of linking it to the actual page in the address bar? Thanks for your answers.
Web Design | | NicolasE0 -
Should I use the google mod_pagespeed in my apache server?
Anyone already use it? There is some speed benefit? http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/docs/module.html
Web Design | | Naghirniac0 -
Image Replacement Using Cufon (Javascript)
Our agency is working with an outside developer that has designed a beautiful site. The possible problem is that they used Cufon to change a large amount of the text on the page to an image of the text in a nicer font. On some pages all of the text is replaced and on others its about 20%. The text that is replaced is identical to what is shown to the user. I realize that Google has stated that sIFR (similar to Cufon) is okay, in a limited way years ago, but I am stil a little leery of the large amount of image replacement that is happening. I am also worried about user experience, should flash not be enabled or it is slower to load. So I have a couple questions. 1. Would this amount of image replacment raise a flag to Google, especially since it is the heading tags and large chunks of the body content both? 2. I know about 2% of the site's users do not have javascript enabled. Do you have an idea of what percentage of people have issues, like slow connection speeds or slow computers, using javascript even if it is enabled?
Web Design | | DirectiveGroup0 -
How to serve a Mobile & Full Site using one URL?
Hello, Does anyone know of any resources or tutorials that outline how to serve a smartphone-formatted website using the same URL as the full site? I know that one solution is using media-queries to serve a seperate CSS stylesheet, but you still have the full HTML source code. In other words, I might want to serve a smartphone & desktop user different content, but under one URL. WP Touch (Wordpress Plugin) is a perfect example of what I mean, but how is it technically achieved? It serves two different sets of HTML for smartphone & full, but using one URL http://www.bravenewcode.com/store/plugins/wptouch-pro/
Web Design | | petecampbell-bmi0 -
Which CMS Should Use?
I have a desinger working on a new webiste and he's suggesting that WP creates design limitations (He's doing quite a bit of HTML 5 I believe...I'm not sure) and obviosly has secruity concerns. He suggested TextPattern, which I've never heard of. Has anyone had any experience with it? Also, what CMS are you using (besides WP) that you really like and is SEO friendly? Thanks
Web Design | | LuminConsutling0