International SEO and server hosting
-
I'd appreciate feedback on a situation. We're going through a major overhaul in how we globally manage our websites.
Regional servers were part of our original plan (one in Chicago, UK, and APAC) but we've identified a number of issues with this approach. Although it's considered a best practice among many, the challenges we'd face doing it are considerable (added complexity, added steps and delays to updating sites, among others).
So, we shifted our plan and how are looking at hosting here in the US but to use Akami to deliver images and other heavier data pieces from their local servers (in the UK, etc.). This is how many of the larger companies like Amazon, etc. delivery their global websites.
We hope that using Akami will allow us to have good performance while simplifying our process. Any warning signs we should be aware of? Anyone doing it this way and has a good experience/bad experience?
-
Gerd knows a lot more about CDNs than I do
Yes, you absolutely need to have the CDN content appear as your own subdomain. Standard SEO applies for your image and video content optimization to make sure the content which is now sitting on the subdomain (not your TLD) gets indexed properly.
-
Make sure that your CDN services provide you with domain aliasing - for example if your domain is www.example.com you want your CDN services host-name be part of the domain - i.e. cdnuk.example.com for the UK region.
You will then at least get some value from image crawlers etc. Don't go for any CDN service which does not allow your content to resolve to a subdomain of your primary domain.
SEO does play a role though as the speed of the CDN will affect your overal pagespeed and will also affect how much content a bot will be able to crawl within your allocated crawl quota. The faster your load-time/CDN the more content will be crawled.
I would not bother with localisation tags if your main objective is to optimise performance / page-load time based on your users geo-location.
It looks like you set your mind on Akami, but I would perhaps also evaluate Amazon S3/Cloudfront or Rackspace as those service deliver the same level of SLA but might be more cost-effective for your purposes.
Get your CDN provides to give you a 1-2 month free proof-of-concept (they will only offer this if your traffic is substantial) so that you can try out the service. Never sign up for contracts longer than 12 months, and only sign an annual contract if you receive a large discount. Most CDN companies will charge you for 10 months when signing up for an annual contract.
Also ensure that your CDN provider gives you (near-) or preferably real-time access to statistics and performance reports (you want to see how many requests/sec they have served and what the speed was.
Test your site / CDN via tools such as webpagetest.org or pingdom.com - they have POPs across the globe to simulate remote tests.
-
Thanks for confirming!
-
You don't need to do this anymore. Google uses other signals now to determine what region you should appear in. They understand that someone may choose to host a site in the US rather than some small country for reliability reasons. Just geo-target your sites and you will be fine.
s) and language tag
b) proper language for that region
c) add your local address and contact information to your footer globally if possible
d) geo-target in WMT
Sites like amazon serve their heavier data pieces locally for performance issues, not for SEO.
Same rules apply though with interlinking same owned sites sitting on the same server though.
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
-
SEO Friendly Facets
Hi I'm still stuck on the subject if SEO friendly facets. Firstly, is it worth investing time in over things like SEO campaigns/content marketing as I'm the only one working on SEO and trying to prioritise all tasks 🙂 Can I set up facets so they are SEO friendly - should they simply be blocked? my concern is wasting crawl budget and duplicate pages. Here's an example of a page on the site - https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/lift-tables Here's an example of a facet URL - https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/lift-tables#facet:-1002779711011711697110,-700000000000001001651484832107103,-700000000000001057452564832109109&productBeginIndex:0&orderBy:5&pageView:list& What would be the best course of action to take to make them SEO friendly? Tips would be appreciated 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
SEO penalty for changing domains by simply switching DNS on Wordpress and adding 301s server-side?
Working on a domain change for a client. They're hosted on Wordpress and their developer wants to simply switch out the DNS for the new domain to point to wordpress, and then have the old domain use 301s to redirect to the new domain. The url structure will be the same, but there will be no CMS connected to the old domain after the switch. Is this dangerous for SEO? A significant portion of their customers are from organic traffic and losing SEO value would be very bad.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dfolwell0 -
Best SEO url woocommerce, what to do?
Hi! Today we have our product categories indexed (by misstake) and for one of our desired keywords, a category have the nr 1 rank. By misstake, we didnt set nofollow, noindex on our categories, just tags, archives etc. We are now migrating to from Ithemes Exchange to Woocommerce and ime looking on improving our SEO urls for the categories. For keyword "Key1" we rank with this url: http://site/product-category/Key1. The seo meta title and description where untouched when we launched the site last spring so it doesnt look so good.. The plan is to stripe out product-category and instead ad some description ( i have a newly written text of 95 words, 519 letters without space with they keyword precent 5 times in a natural way ) to that particular category and have the url as following: http://site/key1 and then have a 301 redirect for the old http://site/product-category/Key1. What do you think of this? What shall i consider? on the right track? Grateful for any help! // Jonas
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | knubbz0 -
International Sitemaps
Hey Dudes, Quick question about international sitemaps. Basically we have a mix of subfolders, subdirectories, and ccTLDs for our different international/language sites. With this in mind how do you recommend we set up the site map. I'm thinking the best solution would be to move the subfolders and subdirectories onto an index and put the ccTLD site maps on their own root only. domain.ca/sitemap (This would only contain the Canada pages) domain.com, fr.domain.com, domain.com/eu/ (These pages would all have an index on domain.com/sitemap that points to each language/nations index) OR Should all site have a site map under their area. domain.com/sitemap, fr.domain.com/sitemap, domain.com/eu/sitemap, domain.ca/sitemap? I'm very new to international SEO. I know that our current structure probably isn't ideal... but it's what I've inherited. I just want to make sure I get a good foundation going here. So any tips are much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | blake.runyon0 -
Is SEO as Effective on AJAX Sites?
Hey Everyone, I had a potential client contact me about doing SEO for their site and I see that they have an AJAX site where all the content is rendered dynamically via AJAX. I've been doing SEO for years, but never had a client with an AJAX site. I did a little research and see how you can setup alternative pages (or snapshots as Google calls them) with the actual content so the pages are crawlable and will get indexed, but I'm wondering if that is as effective as optimizing static HTML pages or if Google treats AJAX page alternatives as less trustworthy/valuable. Also, does having the site in AJAX effect link building and social sharing? With the link structure, it seems there could be some issues with pointing links and passing link juice to internal pages Thanks! Kurt
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kurt_Steinbrueck1 -
Video seo stats
I've come across various places that give statistics for things like "Video search results have a higher click-through than plain text results. " and
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gordon_Hall
"Video is 50 times more likely to get organic page ranks in Google than plain text results" How true are these and does anyone have a definitive guide to video SEO?0 -
Heavy Internal Linking Help
One of the sites I work on is a home improvement ecommerce website that does fairly well for its niche. One of the biggest problems that we're not sure how to adequately handle is a heavy internal linking issue. The homepage (http://www.fauxpanels.com/) has approx. 226 internal links which is mainly due to the navigation structure. There are far worse pages though (the Samples page http://www.fauxpanels.com/samples.php has over 800 internal links). For the most part, management doesn't want any massive changes to the navigation layout. The Top navigation bar has a number of dropdown menus when you hover, the Left Navigation Bar expands to show more choices, and the Bottom navigation bar in many instances is just repeats of links that can be found elsewhere. Also, the product links in the body of the page can be found linked in the Left Navigation. This is not what I would personally consider the best way to handle navigation but the Customer Service Department has gotten numerous calls and emails over the years about how much people love our navigation and how easy it is to find things. My thought was trying to lessen the amount of links by having things grouped more often into Category pages/hub pages where applicable so we can remove some of the links. We've also considered NoFollowing links but my understanding is that even if you NoFollow the link equity is still divided by the number of on-page links. So, any of you much more experienced SEOs have any idea how I can lessen the heavy internal linking without completely re-doing the site's navigation layout and not harming link equity, ranking, etc.? Or, conversely, would you consider having an average 200-300 internal links per page not to be a real issue given the positive effect it has apparently had on user experience?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MikeRoberts0 -
What are the SEO implications of a CNAME?
(please ignore ridiculousness of hypothetical situation) Lets say Amazon had a food division which was at food.amazon.com. I partnered with Amazon's food division and now food.amazon.com will point to my website (food.com). Amazon adds a CNAME record so food.amazon.com resolves to food.com. If food.amazon.com has built up significant page rank / domain authority, will food.com be getting those benefits? Also, lets say food.amazon.com/rice has a lot of PR / authority -- will food.com benefit from the value of those internal pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chadburgess0