SEO issues with CDN & Custom SSL with 2 different certificates

[Aman_123]

This post is deleted!

[max.favilli]

Just all content must be served from SSL http connections. It doesn't matter if the certificates are not the same.

[LesleyPaone]

Yes, it will create issues and it is a pain to deal with. The way that I found to deal with it, in my opinion is not the best but it works. Set your site up to detect google bot and not serve CDN images to google bot. That will help keep things indexed.

[max.favilli]

What kind of issues are you experiencing? I do have a couple of websites serving images from a third level domain with a different SSL certificate and I have never experienced any issue, images are indexed and well positioned.

Plus, I have never heard of such a penalization and it doesn't make sense, a SSL connection is secure no matter who issue the certificate, and html img src is supposed to be used to host images from other domain, it doesn't make sense to penalize a website for that.

Google is meticulously punishing cloaking, I would stay away from it.

[LesleyPaone]

This is the normal layout I use in setting up a CDN. site.com for the main content and cdn.site.com for the cdn content. I have found that doing it that way de-indexes the images from site.com and re-indexes it on cdn.site.com Which if you have high ranking images on site.com pretty much puts you back at 0.

[max.favilli]

Of course it does reindex them on the third-level domain, but it's not going to affect ranking of tld. And it should not affect images ranking either, you just have to give them a short while to regain their positions as soon as reindexing is done.

Is it a problem to have the images indexed on a different domain? Why?

[LesleyPaone]

Right, but dealing with ecommerce I have a lot of clients that rank well with images. If the images are taken out of the index and added to a new sub domain, they lose all of the value of the main domain and never come back up. They are generally competing with people that might be using the same images, or very similar ones so it is a tough market and people generally cannot afford all of their images to be de-indexed for a while and then at the same time lose their ranking on them because they are using a new sub domain.

[max.favilli]

Finally I understand your point, but... Have you measured it? You have some cases where you moved the images to a third-level domain and after re-index you observed a ranking drop?

Because I did it once, for an e-commerce, and I didn't observe that. It's just one case, and doesn't mean much, but just searching on google for this topic I can find many who claim to have witnessed an increase in images ranking thanks to the adoption of a cdn.

Domain of an image url is for sure a ranking factor, and you probably are right. But I would like others to jump into the discussion and help to clarify.

Because I think google images algo is more keen on evaluating other (well known) factors. And it's logic. If you have some html on site.com with one image coming from flickr.com and one coming from worthlessdomain.com, which one would you favour in images SERP? Flickr? Why? Doesn't say anything about the relevancy of that image for that keyword.

Of course if you have an html page about flowers on site.com, and you have one image coming from worthlessdomain.com and one image from asitefullofflowersimages.com it may have some relevancy, but is it for the domain authority/trust? Or because all the images of asitefullofflowersimages.com are of flowers, with flowers alt text and so on? I bet the second.

Plus, google guidelines suggest to serve images from a cookieless domain to improve performance, of course they mean to improve performance to improve ranking of the page, and in that context they are probably disregarding SEO for images.

I don't have the minimum idea if domain authority/trust is such a strong ranking factor for images, and I have the impression you have more experience than me on this subject, but I am still very skeptical.