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.
Will using a service such as Akamai impact on rankings?
-
Howdy
My client has a .com site they are looking at hosting via Akamai - they have offices in various locations, e.g UK, US, AU, RU & in some Asian countries.
If they used Akamai, would the best approach be to set up seperate sites per country:
- .co.uk
- .com
- .com.au
- .ru
- .sg etc
Although my understanding is that Googlebot is located in the US so if it crawled any of those sites it would always get a US IP address?
So is the answer perhaps to go with Akamai for the .com only which should target the US market and use different / seperate C class hosts for the others?
Thanks!
Woj
-
My understanding of how a CDN is configured is it's a back-end server change. The HTML will still appear as mysite.com/image.jpg but when a request for that image is made, your server will tell the user's browser to fetch it from cdn.chicago.akamai.com/mysite.com/image.jpg.
Your server still hosts the image and is the primary source of the image. That image is duplicated on CDN servers throughout the country and world depending on what cdn plan you purchase.
So in short, the images are hosted on mysite.com and images should not be taken out of the mix. You can confirm this by checking well known sites which use Akamai:
-
Ryan,
What about when images are handled through Akamai and the URL's to those images are "Akamaized". Since the images are not hosted on the www.mysite.com, but on www.akamai.com, how would this effect image search. Does it take my images out of the mix. Would an image sitemap help with this?
-
Thanks, makes perfect sense
-
Google effectively crawls all types of sites from around the world. As long as you offer proper navigation with your site, there shouldn't be any issue.
Your content for each region should have a landing page for that region. mysite.com/jp would be your landing page for Japan, etc. Your landing pages would be treated as your home page for Japanese speakers. You should have links from Japanese companies to the /jp page as if it was your site's home page.
-
Thanks Ryan!
I guess my main concern is to not have existing rankings penalised. For example, the head office is based in Australia with other offices around the world - if Googlebot comes in from the US and gets a US IP.. would Australian rankings drop?
Also, I believe the content being served will be identical to all regions.. for now at least.
-
Akamai offers numerous services. Are you referring to their Content Delivery Network? If so, then the CDN will provide faster page load times which is a good user experience. If your site was being penalized for slow load times (only a small percentage of sites fall into this category) then yes, by properly setting up your content on a CDN you can remove the penalty which would improve rankings. Otherwise you would not directly benefit in terms of rankings, but your users will likely find your site more usable, explore more, etc. which could benefit your rankings.
With respect to your site design, I would recommend a single .com site with folders for each country. mysite.com/ru for russia, mysite.com/au for australia, etc. This method will allow you to collect all your domain authority in a single site and can greatly reduce your software and site maintenance expenses.
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
-
Should I optimize the login page? Will it affect the website SEO ranking?
I'm trying to resolve the site crawl issues that we have on our website. One of the links that has different issue types together is our login page. Currently we have two login pages that have the same content but different sub domains. **However I'm wondering if optimizing SEO on our login pages affects our website SEO ranking and if it's something better to do or not. ** To point out the details of the issues, the issue types that the logins pages have are "duplicate title", "duplicate content", "missing H1", "missing description", "thin content", "missing canonical tag" I'd appreciate your help, thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kaylie0 -
The main navigation is using JS, will this have a negative impact on SEO?
Hi mozzers, We just redesigned our homepage and discovered that our main nav is using JS and when disabling JS, no main nav links was showing up. Is this still considered bad practice for SEO? https://cl.ly/14ccf2509478 thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ty19861 -
Will Reduced Bounce Rate, Increased Pages/Session, Increased Session Duration-RESULT IN BETTER RANKING?
Our relaunched website has a much lower bounce rate (66% before, now 58%) increased pages per session (1.89 before, now 3.47) and increased session duration (1:33 before, now 3:47). The relaunch was December 20th. Should these improvements result in an improvement in Google rank? How about in MOZ authority? We have not significantly changed the content of the site but the UX has been greatly improved. Thanks, Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan11 -
Page rank and menus
Hi, My client has a large website and has a navigation with main categories. However, they also have a hamburger type navigation in the top right. If you click it it opens to a massive menu with every category and page visible. Do you know if having a navigation like this bleeds page rank? So if all deep pages are visible from the hamburger navigation this means that page rank is not being conserved to the main categories. If you click a main category in the main navigation (not the hamburger) you can see the sub pages. I think this is the right structure but the client has installed this huge menu to make it easier for people to see what there is. From a technical SEOÂ is this not bad?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AL123al0 -
Will multiple domains from the same company rank for the same keyword search?
I'm trying to convince people that we need good marketing reasons for starting multiple domains, as it will be more difficult to rank multiple sites. Does anyone know if Google actively discourages multiple domains from the same company appearing in the search results for the same keyword? We are creating a separate content website which is related to an existing company website. Would you agree that is best to have these sites on one domain with the content site on a sub-domain perhaps? I'm worried about duplication of effort and cross-keyword targeting in particular. These sites would not have duplicate content.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RG_SEO0 -
Will changing Google Places address hurt rankings?
I have a client transferring ownership of their service business (photo booth rental). The current listed address will change, so my main concern is preserving the rankings during the transition. Should I change the Google Local listing to a new physical address, or change it to "serve a surrounding area"? It seems best to set as "serving a surrounding area", but I know Google is really weird about making local listing changes. I've seen and heard about countless listings falling completely off the map after being updated. Any advice appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Joes_Ideas0 -
Use of subdomains, subdirectories or both?
Hello, i would like your advice on a dilemma i am facing. I am working a new project that is going to release soon,  thats a network of users with personal profiles seperated in categories for example lets say the categories are colors. So let say i am a member and i belong in red color categorie and i got a page where i update my personal information/cv/resume as well as a personal blog thats on that page. So the main site is giving the option to user to search for members by the criteria of color. My first idea is that all users should own a subdomain (and this is how its developed so far) thats easy to use and since the domain name is really small (just 3 letters) i believe subdomain worth since personal site will be easy to remember. My dilemma is should all users own a subdomain, a subdirectory or both and if both witch one should be the canonical? Since it said that search engines treat subdomains as different stand-alone sites, whats best for the main site? to show multiple search results with profiles in subdomains or subdirectories? What if i use both? meaning in search results i use search directory url for each profile while same time each profile owns a subdomains as well? and if so which one should be the canonical? Thanks in advance, C
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HaCos0 -
How do you implement dynamic SEO-friendly URLs using Ajax without using hashbangs?
We're building a new website platform and are using Ajax as the method for allowing users to select from filters. We want to dynamically insert elements into the URL as the filters are selected so that search engines will index multiple combinations of filters. We're struggling to see how this is possible using symfony framework. We've used www.gizmodo.com as an example of how to achieve SEO and user-friendly URLs but this is only an example of achieving this for static content. We would prefer to go down a route that didn't involve hashbangs if possible. Does anyone have any experience using hashbangs and how it affected their site? Any advice on the above would be gratefully received.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sayers1