How was cdn.seomoz.org configured?
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The SEOmoz CDN appears to have a "pull zone" that is set to the root of the domain, such that any static file can be addressed from either subdomain:
http://www.seomoz.org/q/moz_nav_assets/images/logo.png
http://cdn.seomoz.org/q/moz_nav_assets/images/logo.png
The risk of this configuration is that web pages (not just images/CSS/JS) also get cached and served by the CDN. I won't put the URL here for fear of Google indexing it, but if you replace the 'www' in the URL below with 'cdn', you'll see a cached copy of the original:
http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/the-greatest-attribution-ever-graphed
The worst-case scenario is that the homepage gets indexed. But this doesn't happen here:
That URL issues a 301 redirect back to the canonical www subdomain. As it should.
Here's my question: how was that done?
Because maxcdn.com can't do it. If you set a "pull zone" to your entire domain, they'll cache your homepage and everything else. googlebot has a field day with that; it will reindex your entire site off the CDN.
Maybe the SEOmoz CDN provider (CloudFront) allows specific URLs to be blocked? Or do you detect the CloudFront IPs and serve them a 301 (which they'd proxy out to anyone requesting cdn.seomoz.org)?
One solution is to create a pull zone that points to a folder, like example.com/images... but this doesn't help a complex site that has cacheable content in multiple places (do you Wordpress users really store ALL your static content under /wp-content/ ?).
Or, as suggested above, dynamically detect requests from the CDN's proxy servers, and give them a 301 for any HTML-page request. This gets complex quickly, and is both prone to breakage and very difficult to regression-test.
Properly retrofitting a complex site to use a CDN, without creating a half-dozen new CDN subdomains, does not appear to be easy.
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