Will using CDN Affect SEO?
-
I'm got a website with a slider and each of the 6 slides has a 5-second video background. The website is B2B and the user profile for the website is employees at Fortune 1000 companies in the United States using desktop computers to browse. The videos are highly optimized and we did testing using various browsers and bandwidth connections to determine the videos loaded fast enough on down to a 15mbit/s connection (which is pretty low by today's average U.S. business bandwidths.)
We tried hosting the videos on Vimeo and YouTube but it caused issues in the timing of the slide show display. (I've not seen any other website do what we do the way we do it. Most sites have a single video background with a single text overlay on top.)
The downside to this is that loading all those videos produces a lot of bandwidth usage for our server. The website is serving a niche service industry though so we're not exceeding our current limits.
I'm wondering though might there be some benefit to hosting just the video files on a CDN? Obviously that would mean lest bandwidth usage for our server, and possibly quicker load times where the CDN server is closer to the user than our server. But are there benefits or downsides from an SEO perspective noting that I'm proposing only putting the videos on the CDN, not the entire web page.
-
In theory as per Joe using a CDN can certainly influence your site speed load, however I found their are a few caveats to this.
Firstly are you serving content in the same country/content to your audience and does your CDN have a node in this location to allow a faster pull of content. The speed gain may only be helped if this is the case.
Second, can your CDN serve content via SSL be it an installed or shared SSL.
And can your CDN serve via HTTP2 for simultaneous loading of files in parallel with one another. All of this can certainly affect your SEO, but hopefully the gains are enough to actually have a positive influence.
For Videos - my favourite is still actually Youtube, it can boost your own following and don't forget Youtube is the second largest search engine that I am aware of. Hosting and having content here can only be an added benefit.
Cheers Tim
-
The quicker your site loads the more rewarded you'll be - SEO wise, but, read the fine print when you research for a service provider, beware of any mention of down-times! This could be detrimental.
My first step would be to optimise the video, see if/ how that speeds things up.
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
-
Will critical error in wordpress for memory limit affect seo rankings?
will critical error in wordpress to increase memory limit affect seo rankings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gamstopbet0 -
Looking for an SEO Mentor
I do in-house marketing for a medium sized luxury architectural design firm. I have a good understanding of the moz platform and general SEO but would like to findsomeone to provide regular guidance and answer some specific questions regarding our SEO. Specifically, we want advising on keywords, blog content, and link building. Ideally we'd like to engage a consultant (remotely) on an hourly basis. We'v have had very poor experiences with big SEO firms so that’s definitely not something we’re looking for. Best,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WorkshopAPD
Caio0 -
How does putting a trial sign up code mid-blog post effect SEO? Do you think it will make my content seem less pleasing, therefor decrease the page rank??
I'm working on driving trials for our product - we have a number of blog posts that rank on page #1 of Google, and we get 2-3 trial sign ups per day from them. I'd like to put trial signup boxes about midway down each post to see if I can increase the number of trial signups that come directly from our blog. Do you think I can be "penalized" for this, since it's mid- blog-post content? Do you think Google will view this negatively?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Karibeaulieu0 -
Will using 301 redirects to reduce duplicate content on a massive scale within a domain hurt the site?
We have a site that is suffering a duplicate content problem. To help resolve this we intend to reduce the amount of landing pages within the site. There are a HUGE amount of pages. We have identified the potential to reduce the pages by half at first by combing the top level directories, as we believe they are semantically similar enough that they no longer warrant being seperated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Silkstream
For instance: Mobile Phones & Mobile Tablets (Its not mobile devices). We want to remove this directory path and 301 these pages to the others, then rewrite the content to include both phones and tablets on the same landing page. Question: Would a massive amount of 301's (over 100,000) cause any harm to the general health of the website? Would it affect the authority? We are also considering just severing them from the site, leaving them indexed but not crawlable from the site, to try and maintain a smooth transition. We dont want traffic to tank. Has anyone performed anything similar? Id be interested to hear all opinions. Thanks!0 -
SEO Strategy for Microsite
I am working on a project to build a microsite of sorts that will represent a joint program between two large organizations with established web presences and strong domains. Each of the organizations has dedicated sections on their sites speaking to the program, but the leadership has decided the joint program deserves it's own site with dedicated content. The two larger sites perform very well for SEO, and I don't necessarily want to jeopordize thir rankings by delivering content that competes directly with them. So I am doing some keyword research to find some opportunities that will alllow me to use the new site to target keywords not yet being captialized by the larger sites. My grand scheme is to have the three sites targeting the broadest array of keywords possible, thus maximizing exposure and avoiding competition. Here is the rub: the content between the three sites will be different but very similar, and there will be plenty of cross linking, especially from the existing sites to the new site, as we grow the brand of the joint program. I'm curious to here some expert opinions on what the puitfalls of the strategy are and what are some of the things I can do to avoid falling in the black hat category - I recognize that proliferating sites around a single topic and cross linking them is black hat. The organizations simply want to build a brand around a joint program and we are striggling to do that without a dedicated website.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AmyLB0 -
Web fonts & SEO
Hi everyone ! My question is regarding web fonts. We are currently working on a new design for our website and we're thinking about using web fonts instead of images containing the fonts we'd like to have. I'd like to know if web fonts can affect SEO as they need to be downloaded on the visitor's computers and consequently can slow down the load time of our web pages. If anyone has used web fonts in the past, do you have some specific tips to share ? Thank you in advance for your answers! Jeremie
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Maxxum0 -
Effects on SEO with CDN
Should we be concerned about any adverse consequences to our site's SEO value when moving the site's assets (javascript files and css files) to a CDN (Akamai)?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Volusion.com0
