SEO dealing with a CDN on a site.
-
This one is stumping me and I need some help. I have a client who's site is www.site.com and we have set them up a CDN through Max CDN at cdn.site.com which is basically a cname to the www.site.com site. The images in the GWT for www.site.com are de-indexing rapidly and the images on cdn.site.com are not indexing. In the Max CDN account I have the images from cdn.site.com sending a canonical header from www.site.com but that does not seem to help, they are all still de-indexing.
-
In my experience Google does a pretty good job of applying the rankings to the CDN version of the image if you follow those best practices.
Good luck!
-
They were being de-indexed until I did this, http://moz.com/community/q/would-this-be-considered-cloaking-and-would-it-be-a-bad-move
The images are not dynamic at all, they have static urls. The only thing that was being changes was the sub domain from www to cdn. When that happened the images started to de-index on the www sub domain, even though the cdn sub domain image had a canonical header pointing back to the www domain. You are welcome to check it out in action, the site is https://www.redwrappings.com.au/
-
Very odd, then, that they're being removed from the index. Do you think it's possible that the images have different URLs depending on which server they're cached on? That could definitely do it. I'd have a friend across the country pull them up and see if the image URL changes.
I'm assuming that the image has some dynamic characters on it, which is pretty common with CDNs under certain configurations. Unfortunately, I've never used MaxCDN. If the image is just cdn.site.com/image.png - I'm afraid I have absolutely no idea why they wouldn't be re-indexed. I have similar CDN images that pull in fine.
-
That article touches on a lot of the issues. Here are my thoughts and you can tell me if I am incorrect in my thinking. For a couple of years the images have been on the www part of the domain, now they are on a CDN sub directory. I was trying to keep them indexed under the www part of domain so that they would keep the authority of the domain. My thoughts were if they are de-indexed under the www and re-indexed under the cdn they would have to climb their way back in the image search rankings. Basically that is what I was trying to avoid.
-
They are static. It is a passthrough CDN that basically strips off the www of the image url and replaces it with cdn.
-
Hello Lesley,
Here is an article that may help, or provide some links to other resources at the bottom: Four Best Practices for Using a CDN .
Are you keeping the same filenames or do those change?
What is in the robots.txt file on the CDN?
Have you set up and verified the CDN in Google Webmaster Tools? If so, have you submitted an XML Sitemap?
-
Hi there,
Could you tell me whether the URLs on your images are static on the CDN sub-domain? Or do they change regularly?
-
Christy,
Sure thing, this is what is in place now, http://moz.com/community/q/would-this-be-considered-cloaking-and-would-it-be-a-bad-move
-
Thanks for the update, Lesley. I'm sorry to hear that you haven't found a solution you're happy with. Let me see if any of the other Associates can help you troubleshoot this. In the meantime, are you able to to share the details of your workaround?
Christy
-
None of the answers really applied. I did a work around that I am not too happy with at the current time.
-
Hi Lesley, what is the current status of this issue? Were you able to resolve it, or are you still having problems? We'd love an update, thanks!
Christy
-
I have not actually set up the robots.txt in maxcdn. But the cdn is not indexing, which is what I am wanting, doing the site: search for the cdn shows no results. For the main site though the images are falling out of the index, even though there is a site map for them and they are still accessible from their normal url.
-
I am not using Wordpress, the site is using PrestaShop, so it does not have those plugins.
This is how it is set up.
cdn.site.com is a cname of www.site.com so images are accessible from www.site.com/image.jpg and cdn.site.com/image.jpg but when they are served from the cdn.site.com/image.jpg they have the canonical header that points to www.site.com/image.jpg I cannot understand why that would de-index all of the images on www.site.com though
-
I had this problem.
Are you using W3 Total Cache... if so you should activate the Yoast SEO extension (presumably you use Yoast, and their sitemaps). You will find it at Performance -> Extensions in the W3 Total Cache admin area.
In addition, with the robots file in Maxcdn you should have something like:
User-agent: *
Disallow:/
Allow: /wp-content/
Allow: /wp-includes/You will find this under the SEO settings of your Pull zone in MaxCDN. Make sure you have robots & canonical header ticked as well.
The W3 Total cache extension will sort all the sitemap problems with pointing to the right URL and canonical. There is no need to do anything manually as some of the articles suggest.
-
I have no problem helping you look into this. I can play with it more tomorrow morning. I have a few more questions though. Did you setup the robots.txt in MaxCDN to point to the origin directory of the images? What happens when you search site:cdn.domain.com or site:www.domain.com in Google?
There are a few ideas that I have into why this is happening but I would like to test them prior to posting.
-
It is a pull zone.
-
Are you currently using a "Pull" or "Push" zone on MaxCDN?
-
That is actually what has been done, I have seen the article before. But there are two issues, one they are not indexing and it has been a couple of weeks. But the more major issue to me is that using the cdn url none of the link juice from the main domain is being passed to the cdn sub domain. I am trying to figure out why Google is not respecting the canonical header for the images. It would seem to me, that according to what Matt Cutts says that it would. But it is not.
-
I have had this issue in past as well when working with MaxCDN. I was able to apply a fix using some of the methods in this article to fix the issue.
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
-
Longterm wordpress blog not providing seo benefit to main site - help needed please
Hi I have a bigcommerce ecommerce store, with a Wordpress blog on a subdomain. The store and blog have been active for four years, the blog is regularly updated with original content, has many links to the store, is promoted regularly via my brand's social media channels and mailing list, and has the simplest SEO basics covered via a Yoast SEO plugin. But the store sees very little, if any, SEO benefit from the blog. My question is: based on this information, and the details below, is there an issue with the connection between the blog and main site in SEO terms? And if there is, how can I start fixing it? Further info: 1 In my Moz dashboard for the store site, the blog does not show at all as providing any inbound links or linking domains 2 Google Analytics also shows zero referral traffic to the store site from the blog since April 2015 3 Moz crawl issues is flagging ‘duplicate page content issues’ for pretty much every page of the blog, and the analysis provided suggests this may be related to tags but I have only basic SEO knowledge and am fast getting out of my depth here. 4 I have today altered the settings within the Yoast plugin on the blog to ‘noindex’ for Tags, Meta Robots, based on advice I have found in this section but am already well over my head and unsure even this is correct. An agency have been running SEO for the store since 2012 but since uncovering how little they have done in this time for the money paid, I am now taking matters back into my own hands. However I am on a very steep learning curve and this one is beyond me right now - please does anyone have any suggestions where I can start looking to uncover the root issue? Any guidance or advice would be greatly appreciated Thanks very much and hope to hear from someone!
Reporting & Analytics | | Warren_331 -
Multiple GA codes, one site.
Hi all, Is anyone running two GA codes on one website successfully? My organisation own a number of websites so we used to have one global GA code on all our sites to track global stats, and then we would also have site unique GA on each property to just track that one property. This worked fine, but of late we seem to be getting no data from the globally based code. Obviously, with the site-specific codes we can enter the name for that domain in GA but for the overall code, it is called 'all.com' I'm wondering if Google has now tied the GA domain to the code or if we are doing something wrong. All the codes are the same as they always were but have stopped working. As a stop gap, we have swapped to using Piwik as the all.com code. However, we are then comparing the stats in two different analytics programs so will get a different result. Also, it would be nice to be able to add the all.com to tools such as this to generate weekly reports. Anyone else having GA woe like this? Thanks. Carl
Reporting & Analytics | | WonkyDog0 -
How do sites without access to a site's analytical data, determine a site's organic traffic?
I've recently used a organic traffic checker that showed you your traffic compared to each google algo update. I was interested in how they derived the organic traffic totals for each month, without having access to our site's google analytics? I've since compared the data to historical google analytics data and it's not wrong, isn't 100% match either but isn't far from fact. So if they're predicting or making a guess, it's rather spot on, site crawlers and SERPs snapshots only provide so much info, I'm just wondering where they get the rest from and how?
Reporting & Analytics | | Deacyde0 -
Redirects to external sites
Hi there, I have listings that all link to external sites. In order to track how many times each link was clicked I coded a redirect script that simply redirects to the respective url. www.mysite.com/go/123/ - redirects to another site www.mysite.com/go/541/ - redirects to a different site Is there anything I should or should not do from seo stand point such as blocking the /go directory in robots or adding a no-follow tag to links? I'd appreciate your advice. Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | vmotuz0 -
SEO implications of moving from https to http
We're considering moving from 100% https to http to improve performance. What, if any, SEO implications are there? Do search engines need redirects when changing from https to http pages?
Reporting & Analytics | | BlueAcorn0 -
Any thoughts on why Nextag and MonsterMarketPlace are linking to our site?
I'm looking in WMT at the crawl errors and I noticed that our website has gotten a lot of Not Found crawl errors that seem strange. A lot of these not found pages are Display URLs that I use in PPC advertising, but not actual redirects (i.e. explorica.com/EducationalTrips). When I looked at how these links were being found, the inbound links were coming from Nextag.com and monstermarketplace.com, two sites that our company has never had a relationship with. We're an educational travel company, so we'd have no reason to. When I followed the links, it looks like it's coming from their "Sponsored Links," but these aren't Google or Bing Ads. We don't even advertise on the content network. Example link: http://www.monstermarketplace.com/starters-and-alternators/alternator-motorola-style-12v-51a-10376 (the ads do rotate so my site might not appear when you check it out). Anyone ever had experience with this type of issue?
Reporting & Analytics | | Explorica0 -
Can I find results for my SEO rankings over an extended period of time?
I was hoping to put a report together chronicling my SEO performance over the last 2 months and couldn't find a place to see prior information.
Reporting & Analytics | | AppNeta0 -
Will Google start trimming 'stale' sites rank?
With the recent focus on Google to reduce rank of farms and low value sites, I am interested to get SEO view on if you think Google will start devaluing stale sites. I do find it a bit frustrating that in the top 5 for my main key phrase, there is one site that has NO content just an error and another blog that has not updated content in 2 years. How can blogs that do not blog be considered high enough value by Google to rank in the top 5? How can sites that just return 404 or 500 for ALL their pages be even considered a site let alone rank 2nd. I am interested so see others experiences and thoughts on 'user experience' clean ups by Google and why these types of sites get missed?
Reporting & Analytics | | oznappies0