International SEO and server hosting

[josh-riley]

I'd appreciate feedback on a situation. We're going through a major overhaul in how we globally manage our websites.

Regional servers were part of our original plan (one in Chicago, UK, and APAC)  but we've identified a number of issues with this approach. Although it's considered a best practice among many, the challenges we'd face doing it are considerable (added complexity, added steps and delays to updating sites, among others).

So, we shifted our plan and how are looking at hosting here in the US but to use Akami to deliver images and other heavier data pieces from their local servers (in the UK, etc.).  This is how many of the larger companies like Amazon, etc. delivery their global websites.

We hope that using Akami will allow us to have good performance while simplifying our process. Any warning signs we should be aware of? Anyone doing it this way and has a good experience/bad experience?

[irvingw]

You don't need to do this anymore. Google uses other signals now to determine what region you should appear in. They understand that someone may choose to host a site in the US rather than some small country for reliability reasons. Just geo-target your sites and you will be fine.

s) and language tag

b) proper language for that region

c) add your local address and contact information to your footer globally if possible

d) geo-target in WMT

Sites like amazon serve their heavier data pieces locally for performance issues, not for SEO.

Same rules apply though with interlinking same owned sites sitting on the same server though.

[josh-riley]

Thanks for confirming!

[MagicDude4Eva]

Make sure that your CDN services provide you with domain aliasing - for example if your domain is www.example.com you want your CDN services host-name be part of the domain - i.e. cdnuk.example.com for the UK region.

You will then at least get some value from image crawlers etc. Don't go for any CDN service which does not allow your content to resolve to a subdomain of your primary domain.

SEO does play a role though as the speed of the CDN will affect your overal pagespeed and will also affect how much content a bot will be able to crawl within your allocated crawl quota. The faster your load-time/CDN the more content will be crawled.

I would not bother with localisation tags if your main objective is to optimise performance / page-load time based on your users geo-location.

It looks like you set your mind on Akami, but I would perhaps also evaluate Amazon S3/Cloudfront or Rackspace as those service deliver the same level of SLA but might be more cost-effective for your purposes.

Get your CDN provides to give you a 1-2 month free proof-of-concept (they will only offer this if your traffic is substantial) so that you can try out the service. Never sign up for contracts longer than 12 months, and only sign an annual contract if you receive a large discount. Most CDN companies will charge you for 10 months when signing up for an annual contract.

Also ensure that your CDN provider gives you (near-) or preferably real-time access to statistics and performance reports (you want to see how many requests/sec they have served and what the speed was.

Test your site / CDN via tools such as webpagetest.org or pingdom.com - they have POPs across the globe to simulate remote tests.

[irvingw]

Gerd knows a lot more about CDNs than I do

Yes, you absolutely need to have the CDN content appear as your own subdomain. Standard SEO applies for your image and video content optimization to make sure the content which is now sitting on the subdomain (not your TLD) gets indexed properly.