Has anyone worked with Edgecast?

[DragonSearch]

They have a caching system where they assign multiple ip's based on location and we are curious how it affects SEO.

[DanDeceuster]

I have no experience with Edgecast, but from what you are describing, doesn't do anything for SEO.

From what I understand of what you are saying, this doesn't affect SEO. If you have a .com, and target users in the U.S. then make sure your site is hosted in the U.S. and the IP address is to a server in the U.S. More specific geographic targeting than that is unnecessary.

But maybe I'm misunderstanding what they do.

[caseyhen]

Hi DragonSearch,

Edgecast is a basic CDN provider which will help your speed and performance on your website.  We at SEOmoz have our own custom CDN which allows us to load our webpages from one server and load our images and other large documents from another server.  If you look at the code on our site you will see some of our images come from http://cdn.seomoz.org.  This is all to increase the speed of our site and reduce the load on our servers.  In the big picture I would spend lots of money on a service like this since it will only have a minor role on your SEO efforts.

Casey

[vdms]

[Disclosure: I work at EdgeCast and have been heavily involved with the company since its founding.]

Daniel & Dragon,

The primary benefit of CDN for SEO is, as Casey said, speed. Users' tolerance for lags is lower than ever, so many search engines are starting to include site speed/performance as part of their ranking algorithms.

To Dragon's multiple-IP question, only the search engines know for sure, but we can tell you that search engines are very aware sites are often hosted far away from where the business is located. (Google has said this explicitly on their Webmaster Blog.) You're likely to fare much better by worrying about things like ccTLDs, on-page signals such as contact information & native language, and ensuring that your content is linked to by other sites in the same region speaking the same language. Google's WMT also lets you set a specific geo-region for your domain, but I'm not sure how strongly that signal is weighed.

I'd also like to take issue with a couple of things Casey said.

First: SEOMoz does not have its own CDN. SEOMoz uses Cloudfront, which is Amazon's CDN. Cloudfront is fairly easy to use, has no volume or contractual commitments, and is a good solution for those who care more about ease-of-use than performance.

I also take issue with Casey's comment about EdgeCast as a "basic" CDN provider. We offer a variety of delivery services, serve almost a million objects a second, and carry a significant percentage of the world's internet traffic. We're also consistently ranked as one of the (often the) fastest CDNs in the market, and handle some of the world's busiest web sites. Our minimum revenue commitment may be out of reach for a small site owner, but several companies (MediaTemple and GoGrid, for example) aggregate and resell our services to smaller users in a no-commitment, pay-as-you-go form.

I'm not out to pump EdgeCast here, but I do want to set the record straight.

Where Casey is absolutely right is that using a CDN will have a drastic impact on your site's load time.

Hope this is helpful.

[DragonSearch]

Thanks everyone for your input - much appreciated!