Thoughts on using a CDN?

[NoahsDad]

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.

[spes123]

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.

[Igal_Zeifman]

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.

[DaveDawson]

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!

[ClaireH-184886]

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.

[NoahsDad]

No problem. Be sure to let me know if you end up trying one.

[EGOL]

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?

[NoahsDad]

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.

[EGOL]

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.