Does a CDN affect search rankings?
-
I feel kind of stupid asking this, but if i use one it would speed things up quite a bit. It is for a ecommerce website, any guidance on this would be awesome!
-
Google officially said the site speed is a SEO factor which, when implemented, will affect 1% of SERP results. This gives some idea of the scope of it's relevancy. (not saying 1% is either high or low, this is all very subjective)
Having said that, beyond speed improvement, CDN provides other SEO related benefits.
I've actually just published a 2-part Blog post that investigates SEO & CDN related myths and talks about CDN and SEO benefits, I hope you`ll find it useful. it should answer all questions:
Part 1: SEO & CDN Myths
Part 2: SEO & CDN benefits -
I use a CDN and have never seen any impact on my SEO. As long as your HTML is served off your domain you're fine.
If you're using AWS Cloudfront you can set up a CNAME so that your content comes from, say, images.mydomain.com instead of xyz.cdn.com. Helps obscure it from visitors and looks a bit neater.
-
Using a properly configured CDN will not have any negative effects on SEO. It can have positive effects on your rankings by offering faster page loads.
With Google's current system, you would not see a SEO benefit per se. If your current site is deemed slow by Google, you could have your current speed penalty lifted.
Moving to a CDN will surely provide a better user experience. Google is constantly adjusting it's algorithms in chase of the best user experience, so this is a chance for you to get ahead of the game. It is reasonable to think in the future Google may consider site speed as a ranking factor.
Two other suggestions regarding setting up a CDN:
-
you need to be very conscious of your cache settings. You could make a change on your site and users will not see the change if you do not ensure that change is propagated throughout your CDN
-
try to include all files which would benefit from a CDN. I have seen some sites just add their videos and image files to the CDN. Custom Javascript, CSS files and so forth can all benefit from CDN. PageSpeed and YSlow are two great tools for optimizing page loading times.
-
-
As far as I know, the urls of your additional resources such as images, css, and scripts shouldn't affect your SEO either way.
-
But, does the use of a Content Delivery Network (cdn) itself affect seo? For example my pics / code will be hosted differently. Just kind of confusing to me since I'm used to URL structure being: mydomain.com/images/pic.jpg instead of xyz.cdn.com/2523/myname/pic.jpg. Is this even something to be concerned about?
-
Site speed is only relevant when your site is extremely slow. Google doesn't penalize you unless your page load time is excessively long. You won't get a boost in rankings by speeding up your site.
With that in mind, Site load times do affect your user experience, so you may notice a lower bounce rate, more pages per visit, and possibly a higher conversion rate.
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
-
Unexpected Rank Down After Page Update
Hello Team, I have a post on my blog which was ranking on #1 in SERP. I always tried to update it with new content.On 31-Mar-2017, I made a big update in it. Like, it was a list of 20 tips and I made it to 50+. I thought it will help me to increase it's CTR. And, I changed its URL and redirect old one to new one.But when I checked today, it was totally disappeared from SERP 😞 it's nowhere. But it is indexed I have checked but not ranking now. I did this thing (Content Upgrade) before and it always gave good results but I don't know what happened now.Any suggestions or help?Old URL: http://excelchamps.com/blog/2015/12/21-useful-macro-codes-for-vba-newcomers/New URL: http://excelchamps.com/blog/2017/03/useful-macro-codes-for-vba-newcomers/-With love and respect,Puneet Gogia
Technical SEO | | ManAPR0 -
Domain not ranking in Google
https://www.buitenspeelgoed.nl/ is a domain acquired by our client. Previously this website was on http://www.buitenspeelgoed-keupink.nl. With the old domain they were ranking top 30 on 'buitenspeelgoed' in google.nl. Now with the new exact match domain they aren't ranking any more (for months). However, the website is indexed, as you can see on http://1l1.be/nz I don't know what to do anymore. Need some advise. What we allready have done the last months: made adjustments to the 301-redirects (this was originaly setup wrong by the webdesigner (de) optimized the homepage on 'buitenspeelgoed' (strange is the fact that the Moz robot can't access the site). Checked the robots.txt to see if the website was blocked for Google Checked the meta robots to see if the website was blocked for Google Disavowed some spammy (old) links which linked to the old domain Checked Search console > Fetch as Google if there isn't any Malware of some kind (and to see if Google can access the site) Checked Search consol to see if there manual spam actions (isn't the case) Checked for duplicate content by copy/paste some texts in Google and see if any other results are showing up (isn't the case for most of the texts) Please let me know what we can do.
Technical SEO | | InventusOnline0 -
Ranking in Bing
My frustration with Google currently has led me to try bing out more. I don't rank as good in bing as Google, so I was wondering if anyone had any great tips of what bing looks for to rank website well? So far I can see they seem to favour keyword domains, take 'cheap holidays' for example. Always reading about what Google want but what do bing want? Any advice much appreciated.
Technical SEO | | pauledwards0 -
Sudden 50% drop in SERP rankings
Hi, Our website is well established and has been growing every month until around Jan. 6th 2013. All of sudden our search rankings on Google dropped dramatically (nearly 50%). We getting tens of thousands fewer visitors through search results than normal. At the same time as the drop (almost to the day) we changed our forum software from Vbulletin3 to Vbulletin4. The forums are on a different subdomain, and our forum developer said there is no way the change would affect the main site. Is that true? So far, we have not been able to figure out what caused the sudden change. Maybe a Google update?
Technical SEO | | AVman0 -
What can i do to stop my site from dropping in the rankings
Hi, we were number one in google for the keyword lifestyle magazine but now our magazine website www.in2town.co.uk is doing very bad in the rankings. One week ago we were around 8 then we went to 12 and now we are on the third page and i am not sure what is happening. We wanted and needed our home page to rank for the keywords of lifestyle magazine, lifestyle news but none of these keywords are doing very well with google can anyone please point me in the right direction so i can stop my site falling any further I am not sure if the home page is properly optimized but i have never had trouble with it before many thanks
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Local search results appearing above Organic
Hello, I've just performed a search for the query 'outdoor clothing' using Google Incognito mode and I've added the screenshots below to show my findings. The first attempt at the search only showed local results then when I clicked search again adverts were shown. I found this very odd, normally I'd see the local results after the 3rd of 4th organic result.Have Google changed their algorithm or is this just random? http://img209.imageshack.us/img209/8643/incognito1.jpg http://img692.imageshack.us/img692/6382/incognito2jf.jpg Thanks, Dan
Technical SEO | | Sparkstone0 -
Sudden Drop in Keyword Rankings
We launched http://www.manufacturedfun.com/ earlier this year and had been ranking 1 & 2 on Google SERPs for the keywords we optimized, but last week we experienced a sudden drop in rankings that pretty much took us off the radar. For instance, 'popcorn machines' went as far back as page 5 and 'popcorn poppers' dropped even further to page 9. We are currently working on fixing the numerous Duplicate Page Title and Duplicate Page Content errors identified by SEOmoz, but since we have had those for about 6 months and ranked well anyway, I wonder if there's something else that we are missing. Any insight you can offer will be sincerely appreciated. Thank you!
Technical SEO | | GRIP-SEO0 -
Warnings on Pages excluded from Search Engines
I am new to this, so my question may seem a little rookie type... When looking at my crawl diagnostic errors there are 1604 warnings for "302 redirects". Of those 1604 warnings 1500 of them are for the same page with different product ID's on them such as: www.soccerstop.com/EMailproduct.aspx?productid=999
Technical SEO | | SoccerStop
www.soccerstop.com/EMailproduct.aspx?productid=998 In our robots.txt file we have Disallow: /emailproduct.aspx Wouldn't that take care of this problem? If so, why is it still giving me these warning errors? It does take into account our robots.txt file when generating this report does it not? Thanks for any help you can provide.
James0