Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
CDN for SEO (or not)?
-
Does CDN impact on SEO or not?
There seems conflicting ideas as to whether they impact positively or negatively, I realise that if the page loads quicker this is a good thing for SEO and usability of course.
Does Google see CDN as just cheating and a get-around for not doing the work from the ground up and using good hosting etc?
Do you have any direct experience?
All constructive input much appreciated!
-
Thank you, Dirk.
I always enjoy getting explicit answers from people who I have grown to trust.
Thanks!
-
I doubt that Google is seeing using a CDN as cheating - it is one of the factors which helps increasing the speed of the site and increase user experience. It would be an ideal world if you could get a 100% score on Pagespeed Insights and all A scores on webpagetest.org - but you have to start somewhere, and adding a CDN is normally one of the easier things to do. So it's certainly not cheating - rather taking a step in the good direction.
Apart from that, Google is offering a CDN itself (https://cloud.google.com/dns/docs).
rgds,
Dirk
-
Hi Egol,
You can mask the url of the CDN behind your own url - so rather than displaying d3vam04na8c92l.cloudfront.net/imagename.jpg (the example is Cloudfront but it's possible for most CDN's) it could be something like images.mysite.com/imagename.jpg - so links to these pages would still be beneficial to your domain rather than the cdn.
Dirk
-
I like the answer given by Nitin. I agree with the speed benefits and that has tempted me to consider CDNs.
I also have a question to toss out....
Let's imagine that I have a site with very popular images or very popular pdf, ppt, doc, etc files. If those are on my domain then google can easily see that popular images in image search are associated with my domain. Also if people embed my images or hotlink my images or link to my pdf ppt doc, etc files then google can see that activity and popularity is associated with my domain.
Many sites have enormous investments beyond typical webpages. Google does rank pdf ppt doc etc files. They accumulate pagerank and have the ability to pass link benefits. In addition, they can build brand mention popularity, as an example, people can say... "Look at this great photo on egol.com" and that mention, I believe, can provide ranking benefit, advertising value for your domain. If people who find your image or other document instead say... "Look at this great photo on xyz123cdn.com" then that strips those benefits from my domain. It strips type-in traffic from my domain.
Does anyone know of any testing or statements from Google that address how image and information files work when used on CDN.
-
Hi,
Generally, people advice to use CDN for serving static content very fast on your site, that helps you improve your page speed and hence, there it adds value from SEO & UX perspective.
Now, the definition of CDN will help you understand how exactly it can help you improve your page speed. So, here you go:
"A CDN is essentially a network of geographically dispersed servers. Each CDN node (also called Edge Servers) caches the static content of a site like the images, CSS/JS files and other structural components. The majority of an end-user's page load time is spent on retrieving this content, and so it makes sense to provide these "building blocks" of a site in as many server nodes as possible, distributed throughout the world.
When a user requests your site, the node closest in proximity to user will deliver the static content, ensuring the shortest distance for the data to travel (reduced latency), therefore providing the fastest site experience."
Also, check the attached image to understand it well. Hope this helps
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
-
Gallery maintenance and the effect on SEO
Basically we get a lot of users uploading photos as part of their review, but many photos aren't moderated into our pages and therefore are never displayed. Things like selfies rather than photos of the product or just random google images that are completely unrelated to our products or services. Is there any benefit in cleaning up the gallery since some images we don't use are just sat there in admin?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fubra
when a page loads, would it be quicker if we had less content in the gallery? With our SEO hat on.
or does it not matter since it's not loading that content (photos) anyway?0 -
Lightboxes and SEO
Do lightboxes (AKA popup boxes when you click "learn more" type CTAs) have any negative effect on SEO? We are looking at revamping our sites to have more of a tiled approach, and a lightbox with summary content popping out with additional CTAs, directing to pages with more information or free trial pages. Is there any downside to this approach from an organic perspective? is there anything specific to keep in mind when creating these if not?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chris81980 -
AJAX requests and implication for SEO
Hi, I got a question in regard to webpages being served via AJAX request as I couldn't find a definitive answer in regard to an issue we currently face: When visitors on our site select a facet on a Listing Page, the site doesn't fully reload. As a consequence only certain tags of the content (H1, description,..) are updated, while other tags like canonical URLs, meta noindex,nofollow tag, or the title tag are not updating as long as you don't refresh the page. We have no information about how this will be crawled and indexed yet but I was wondering if anyone of you knows, how this will impact SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FashionLux0 -
Using a US CDN (Cloudflare) for a UK Site. Should I use a UK Based CDN as it says my server is based in USA
Hi All, We are a UK Company with Uk customers only and use CloudFlare CND. Our Site is hosted by a UK company with servers here but from looking online and checking where my site is hosted etc etc , some sites are telling me the name of our UK Hosted company and other sites are telling me my site is hosted in San Fran (USA) , where I presume the Cloudflare is based. I know Cloudflare has a couple of servers in the UK it uses but given all my customers are UK based ,I don't want this is affect rankings etc , as I thought it was a ranking benefit to be hosted in the country you are based. Is there any issue with this and should I change or is google clever enough to know so i shouldn't worry. thanks Pet
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Are backlinks the most important factor in SEO?
I have had an agency state that "Backlinks are the most important factor in SEO". That is how they are justifying their strategy of approaching bloggers. I believe there are a lot more factors than that including Target Market definition, Keyword identification an build content based on these factors. What's everyone's thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndySalmons0 -
Is CloudFlare bad for SEO?
I have been hit by DDoS attacks lately...not on a huge scale, but probably done by some "script kiddies" or competitors of mine. Still, I need to take some action in order to protect my server and my site against all of this spam traffic that is being sent to it. In the process of researching the tools available for defending a website from a DDoS attack, I came across the service offered by CloudFlare.com. According to the CloudFlare website, they protect your site against a DDoS attack by showing users/visitors they find suspicious an interstitial that asks them if they are a real user or a bot...this interstitial contains a Captcha that suspicious users are asked to enter in order to visit the site. I'm just wondering what kind of an effect such an interstitial could have on my Google rankings...I can imagine that such a thing could add to increased click-backs to the SERPs and, if Google detects this, to lower rankings. Has anyone had experience with the DDoS protection services offered by CloudFlare, who can say a word or two regarding any effects this may have on SEO? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | masterfish1 -
SEO for Korea - Naver & Daum
Google and Yahoo have very little market penetration in the Korean markets. Instead, the popular search engines are Naver and Daum. Naver seems to like keeping traffic within its own network of sites. Does anyone have tips for what things might work to increase search visibility in Korea?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | art-boy0