CDN for SEO (or not)?

[seoman10]

Does CDN impact on SEO or not?

There seems conflicting ideas as to whether they impact positively or negatively, I realise that if the page loads quicker this is a good thing for SEO and usability of course.

Does Google see CDN as just cheating and a get-around for not doing the work from the ground up and using good hosting etc?

Do you have any direct experience?

All constructive input much appreciated!

[_nitman]

Hi,

Generally, people advice to use CDN for serving static content very fast on your site, that helps you improve your page speed and hence, there it adds value from SEO & UX perspective.

Now, the definition of CDN will help you understand how exactly it can help you improve your page speed. So, here you go:

"A CDN is essentially a network of geographically dispersed servers. Each CDN node (also called Edge Servers) caches the static content of a site like the images, CSS/JS files and other structural components. The majority of an end-user's page load time is spent on retrieving this content, and so it makes sense to provide these "building blocks" of a site in as many server nodes as possible, distributed throughout the world.

When a user requests your site, the node closest in proximity to user will deliver the static content, ensuring the shortest distance for the data to travel (reduced latency), therefore providing the fastest site experience."

Also, check the attached image to understand it well. Hope this helps

9tiFzvG.png

[EGOL]

I like the answer given by Nitin.  I agree with the speed benefits and that has tempted me to consider CDNs.

I also have a question to toss out....

Let's imagine that I have a site with very popular images or very popular pdf, ppt, doc, etc files.  If those are on my domain then google can easily see that popular images in image search are associated with my domain.  Also if people embed my images or hotlink my images or link to my pdf ppt doc, etc files then google can see that activity and popularity is associated with my domain.

Many sites have enormous investments beyond typical webpages.  Google does rank pdf ppt doc etc files.  They accumulate pagerank and have the ability to pass link benefits.  In addition, they can build brand mention popularity, as an example, people can say... "Look at this great photo on egol.com" and that mention, I believe, can provide ranking benefit, advertising value for your domain.  If people who find your image or other document instead say... "Look at this great photo on xyz123cdn.com" then that strips those benefits from my domain.  It strips type-in traffic from my domain.

Does anyone know of any testing or statements from Google that address how image and information files work when used on CDN.

[DirkC]

Hi Egol,

You can mask the url of the CDN behind your own url - so rather than displaying d3vam04na8c92l.cloudfront.net/imagename.jpg (the example is Cloudfront but it's possible for most CDN's) it could be something like images.mysite.com/imagename.jpg - so links to these pages would still be beneficial to your domain rather than the cdn.

Dirk

[DirkC]

I doubt that Google is seeing using a CDN as cheating - it is one of the factors which helps increasing the speed of the site and increase user experience. It would be an ideal world if you could get a 100% score on Pagespeed Insights and all A scores on webpagetest.org - but you have to start somewhere, and adding a CDN is normally one of the easier things to do. So it's certainly not cheating - rather taking a step in the good direction.

Apart from that, Google is offering a CDN itself (https://cloud.google.com/dns/docs).

rgds,

Dirk

[EGOL]

Thank you, Dirk.

I always enjoy getting explicit answers from people who I have grown to trust.

Thanks!