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
-
Django and SEO - Multicountry site - Is Django really SEO friendly?
Hi Everyone, Our client is requesting that we use Django for her project. I am really uneasy about this for several reasons. The client wants a multi-country site that is completely SEO friendly. I love Wordpress and if I had to do this project it would be a Wordpress site with WPML + Yoast plugins site. Questions Is Django SEO friendly and what "plugins" should I be using? Is there a multi-country plugin for Django that keeps or adds typical SEO features? Can you recommend any great articles? Any example sites would be GREATLY appreciated Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Carla_Dawson0 -
If Penguin 2.0 targets specific pages and keywords, should I spend less SEO effort on them since will they be harder to optimize? Penalty repair is only starting at end of year.
I’m working with a company that got hit by Penguin 2.0. They’re going to switch to white-hat only for a few months and review analytics before considering repairing the penalty. In the meantime, would it make sense to focus less SEO effort (on-site optimization, link building, etc.) on any pages or keywords that were penalized or hit hardest? Or are those the pages we should work on the most? Thanks for reading!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DA20130 -
Multinational SEO
Hi all The situation: We have a .com website that is the core of our business over the last 3 years we have built this into a very sucessful brand. Customers are able to purchase products from our website and have it delivered anywhere in the world. As part of the development of our business we want to obviously rank high within serps regardless of what country our potential customer is from. We understand that we will need to translate much of our website to achieve this and that is something that we have in the pipeline. My question is more aimed at the English speaking countries and how we should optimise our website for these. For example: websitename.com.au and websitename.co.uk were initialy setup as 301 redirects to websitename.com, however, we have now set them up as their own domains which display the exact same content as the .com website. So to clarify the content on websitename.com/product1.html is also on websitename.com.au/product1.html and websitename.co.uk/product1.html What would the best way to ensure that our .com.au and .co.uk gain traction within the appropriate country? Is duplicate content still an issue? All our prices are displayed in USD will this go againts? We use US English (with a sprinkle of chinglish) as our websites copy languange should we change spelling for AU and UK? Does anyone have any case studies and or other reports I can read that may help me find the right solution for us. Thanks Danny
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DannyCarter0 -
Server Migration, Does it effect SEO?
About to go through a server migration. My intitial thought is that a change in servers shouldn't really change my rankings. But I've heard rumors... Can a server migration change rankings? Why?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Thos0030 -
Seo for mobile and apps
I have a client with a website who's URL is a very common name (most people say this phrase daily). My questions are: How would you best SEO for this site given the common nature of their URL They want to move to mobile and are wondering if their mobile site needs different SEO then their main page Is there a way to SEO apps?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | StreetwiseReports0 -
Is this Negative SEO?
Hello Everyone, I have just spent the past 9 months designing, engineering, and manufacturing our first product. We just opened our web store and started selling product. http://miveu.com. I have spent zero time doing any kind of SEO. We haven't even put up a sitemap yet or any redirects. I'm just now starting to take a look at things. As soon as I start digging, I find that it appears that someone is at least attempting to do some kind of negative SEO against us. It seems to have started about a month ago. Check this out. https://www.google.com/search?q=miveu&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-beta#q=miveu&hl=en&client=firefox-beta&hs=bo2&tbo=1&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&prmd=imvns&source=lnt&tbs=qdr:d&sa=X&psj=1&ei=AGgBUJfJNK650QHW8YW-Bw&ved=0CE0QpwUoAg&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.,cf.osb&fp=335379d2f3ac2208&biw=993&bih=637 At first I was thinking this isn't so good, but it seems they are just trying to build crap content about our keywords and make it relevant to us. After taking a closer look, I'm thinking maybe this isn't all bad. They have targeted all of our exiting YouTube videos and created new videos that use all of our keywords, titles, people, etc in an effort to make our existing videos irrelevant. They have have also done the same thing with articles that were written about us, awards we have won as well as started negative campaigns about us and people who have said good things about us. Here are my thoughts. While the content is really crappy, it seems like they are actually building keyword relevance to us and our products. They have all the right keywords, the content is just crappy. "There is no such thing as bad press". I don't know if anyone has ever said this before, but I'm going to refer to their effort as "White-Hate SEO" because it doesn't appear to be a real dark effort. Am I missing something here, am I way off base? My bigger worry is that their campaign may include some much darker efforts that I just haven't found yet. I'm pretty sure I know who is responsible for this. They have made it clear that they really do hate us. Frankly, I'm not interested in retaliation, I just want to get my own house in order with some good old-school whit-hat SEO. I'm really curious to hear your thoughts on this. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dmac
David0 -
What is the best way to learn SEO?
I was wondering if it's worth taking an SEO Training course. If so is it better to take a live class or Online class. Or is better to just read all the SEO Books out there? Or is there a good video series anyone can recommend? What is the best way to learn SEO? I have a good understanding of SEO but I'm not a Pro ( Yet ). Obviously SEO is always evolving so even the Pro's are constantly updating their skill set but I want to make sure my foundation is solid and complete. Advice Please. Thank you all.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bronxpad0 -
If you have an unlimited SEO budget, what would you do?
Here's a bit of background information: I've achieved the targets and is now being offered what is essentially an unlimited budget. I have a nice list of ideas but thought I would the brilliant people here at the SEOMOZ community what they would do. So as to promote as much response as possible, I'm going to keep my list to myself for now. And by "SEO", I mean I can do things like content strategy, blogging, infographics, etc. Shoot away!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andrep0