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You shouldn't have any issues, as long as you do it correctly (use CNAMES, etc.)

Faster site speed (if you actually use a fast CDN) will also have a positive SEO impact (although we don't know how much weight this is being given.)

I believe SEOMoz is still using CloudFront.

If you want good third-party data on CDN performance, check CloudClimate or Cedexis.

[Disclosure: I work at EdgeCast and have been heavily involved with the company since its founding.]

Daniel & Dragon,

The primary benefit of CDN for SEO is, as Casey said, speed. Users' tolerance for lags is lower than ever, so many search engines are starting to include site speed/performance as part of their ranking algorithms.

To Dragon's multiple-IP question, only the search engines know for sure, but we can tell you that search engines are very aware sites are often hosted far away from where the business is located. (Google has said this explicitly on their Webmaster Blog.) You're likely to fare much better by worrying about things like ccTLDs, on-page signals such as contact information & native language, and ensuring that your content is linked to by other sites in the same region speaking the same language. Google's WMT also lets you set a specific geo-region for your domain, but I'm not sure how strongly that signal is weighed.

I'd also like to take issue with a couple of things Casey said.

First: SEOMoz does not have its own CDN. SEOMoz uses Cloudfront, which is Amazon's CDN. Cloudfront is fairly easy to use, has no volume or contractual commitments, and is a good solution for those who care more about ease-of-use than performance.

I also take issue with Casey's comment about EdgeCast as a "basic" CDN provider. We offer a variety of delivery services, serve almost a million objects a second, and carry a significant percentage of the world's internet traffic. We're also consistently ranked as one of the (often the) fastest CDNs in the market, and handle some of the world's busiest web sites. Our minimum revenue commitment may be out of reach for a small site owner, but several companies (MediaTemple and GoGrid, for example) aggregate and resell our services to smaller users in a no-commitment, pay-as-you-go form.

I'm not out to pump EdgeCast here, but I do want to set the record straight.

Where Casey is absolutely right is that using a CDN will have a drastic impact on your site's load time.

Hope this is helpful.

It varies depending on the work I am doing at the moment but generally 10-20 images maybe?Never more than 20 I wouldn't think, except on rare occasions (big premiere, etc.) ... if you look in my profile under "my portfolio site" you will see a link to the site.

Hey all,

I accidentally posted this as a private question and now want to post it publicly due to some updates (for the worse.)

I'm a photographer and the site I'm talking about is my portfolio site. It is very image heavy and had basically no text. Those who have consistently beat me (positions 1,2, etc.) in SERPs for my key search phrases have a modest amount of text on their pages.

I'd been doing OK in SERPs (top 3-5 for my key search phrases) over the past couple years and my site has decent age and domain authority (a good number of relevant inbound links from extremely reputable sources over the years, etc. etc.) [In case it matters, my root domain has a PageRank of 4 and I have a couple internal pages with PR5.]

For years I resisted adding any text because I was trying to obey Google's rule to design "for people, not search engines."

Over the past couple of months, though, I got some advice on the SEOMoz webinar about adding (relevant) alt text and body text, and also read Google's Webmaster Central article about giving images good titles and alt tags, so I decided to take the plunge about ten days ago.

I went through the site and added modest amounts of relevant text to pages where it was appropriate and where it didn't detract (too much) from the design. I made sure my images had sensible human-readable alt tags that were descriptive and made sure not to do any keyword stuffing.

Finally, I edited some of my page titles so that they were a little more descriptive. Again, nothing extreme or radical or spammy.  (But overall, esp. from Google's perspective, there were some fairly significant changes in a short period of time.)

Well.. you're all already guessing what's next. As soon as Google saw these changes, I tanked pretty badly. I went from position 3-5 on my key phrases to positions like 16-25 and spent a few days in those positions.

Now I'm just gone & buried somewhere in Google's boneyard. My latest ranking report for today shows me "not in top 50" for any of my key phrases on Google.

I'm #1 for many of those same terms/phrases on Bing and Yahoo. (Always have fared very well with them.)

Google's webmaster tools says my sitemap is OK and most of the URLs submitted are in the index.

Please tell me this is temporary, while Google deals with my changes? (Actually don't, just tell me what you really think.)

Thank you all...

You shouldn't have any issues, as long as you do it correctly (use CNAMES, etc.)

Faster site speed (if you actually use a fast CDN) will also have a positive SEO impact (although we don't know how much weight this is being given.)

I believe SEOMoz is still using CloudFront.

If you want good third-party data on CDN performance, check CloudClimate or Cedexis.