Proper CDN Implementation

[highlyrelevant]

I am working with a site that is using the Cloudflare CDN to deliver their images. The problem is that the URLs for the images are all cloudflare URLs (cloudflare.com/example-filename.png). We want to use a cname to change the image URLs to be on a subdomain of their site to take advantage of the SEO strength.

Currently, they get a high percentage of traffic from image search and Google is directing users to their site when returning images hosted on Cloudflare, so I am apprehensive about making changes. I'm curious if anyone has any experience with this or has any insight on how Google will handle it.

Will the longer term benefits out way any short term drop in traffic from image search? WIll there be a drop in image search?

Any thoughts or experiences are appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

[Igal_Zeifman]

Hi Lisa

This is interesting.

As far as I can tell, everything is configured 100% correctly.

Few questions:

1. Do you keep all images in /sites/default/files/?
    Were all (most) of your errors related to items using that path?

2. This could be a downtime issue. Did you experience any availability problems?

3. Do you see any changes in the error report? (different results for the same URL)
    If so, this makes my downtime theory more plausible.

Also, the site loaded VERY slowly for me.

I've run Google Page speed and saw that you have issue with Cache headers (low expiration date that makes it harder to leverage local and CDN caching capabilities)

See here: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights#url=http_3A_2F_2Fwww.mnn.com_2F&mobile=false&rule=LeverageBrowserCaching

This should be looked at. Beyond the immediate ux and seo implications, this can contribute to server load and can be have a negative effect on website's availability. (i.e. the above mentioned downtime)

Best

Igal

[Aggie]

Igal-

Related question.  We just moved to a CDN for our images.  Our site is www.mnn.com and our CDN is http://images.mnn.com/.  The only thing we’re allowing Google to crawl are the images,  so we shouldn’t have any duplicate content issues.

However, what I AM seeing is several thousand warnings in Google Webmaster Tools for our video sitemap.  Our video sitemap contains about 618 videos, but we have 2,472 errors citing “Sitemap contains urls which are blocked by robots.txt” which I believe is related to the video icons in search.

When I look for a video in Google, I still see our icons related.  I can’t seem to figure this one out.

Any thoughts?

Lisa

[Igal_Zeifman]

I`ve recently covered this in a blog post about SEO & CDN Myth busting. The short answer is "No", as Google is well aware of CDN structures.
I think the image traffic drop is un-related and it may have something to do with Bot Blocking features that prevent access from Google Image bot (which, as we recently discovered, can use non-US IPs and thus may also be considered as "fake" ).

Having said that, Google official statement says that speed factors only affect 1% of SERP results. If your image traffic is high or/and valuable I would re-think this.

[AgentsofValue]

The typical way of doing this is to setup a subdomain, specifically for the content that is going to be served from a CDN, and then use a CNAME to map the ugly CDN url to the clean subdomain that you setup.  I've only done this with Rackspace and AWS.  If you want a good description of how this is done on AWS, see this link:

http://www.labnol.org/internet/setup-content-delivery-network-with-amazon-s3-cloudfront/5446/

Apparently, cloudflare has a way to map your website url to the CDN, as long as you're hosting with a cloud server system that they support.  I haven't tried this before, but it might actually be a cleaner way of doing this, if you're hosting setup supports it.

http://blog.cloudflare.com/zone-apex-naked-domain-root-domain-cname-supp

It sounds like this would be a big win for your client, as they get a large percentage of traffic from image traffic.  Using a CDN service is going to improve the speed of loading images and reduce their bandwidth bill, and mapping the CNAME should give their domain the credit for being the source of the image.