SEO dealing with a CDN on a site.

[LesleyPaone]

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.

[Everett]

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!

[LesleyPaone]

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/

[Carson-Ward]

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.

[LesleyPaone]

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.

[LesleyPaone]

They are static. It is a passthrough CDN that basically strips off the www of the image url and replaces it with cdn.

[Everett]

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?

[Carson-Ward]

Hi there,

Could you tell me whether the URLs on your images are static on the CDN sub-domain? Or do they change regularly?

[LesleyPaone]

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

[Christy-Correll]

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

[LesleyPaone]

None of the answers really applied. I did a work around that I am not too happy with at the current time.

[Christy-Correll]

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

[LesleyPaone]

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.

[LesleyPaone]

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

[TheWebMastercom]

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.

[calvinfab]

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.

[LesleyPaone]

It is a pull zone.

[calvinfab]

Are you currently using a "Pull" or "Push" zone on MaxCDN?

[LesleyPaone]

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.

[calvinfab]

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.