Page Speed Factors For SEO

[AkashMakwana]

Hey Guys,

I have developed a page and optimised it. I have got a dilemma, I have 2 variants of the optimised page I could use. The page is responsive and uses bootstrap from an external CDN.

The 2 variants:

1. External CDN - This is adding an an extra request and is delivering the entire framework (not ideal for mobile) I've looked in the node/grunt.js route (+unCSS) to remove redundant CSS, which led me to my next variant.

2. Inline CSS. After doing some grunt.js work I shaved out the redundant code from the framework then added it inline.

I will also point out that all assets are optimised, all CSS/JS/HTML is minifed.

In terms for score the 1st variant is less than the second, but I believe that most users of the internet already have bootstrap cached due to it being so common.

The ultimate question comes down to ranking, I'm not entirely sure where I draw the line between development and SEO (I will also ask in Stack Overflow).

Which one would rank better? all other factors being equal.

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hi Akash,

The true answer is that you'll never notice any difference between the two as the other factors are far more of influence in a ranking 'game'. However I would go with your first option as it would have the files cached probably already and on this save some valuable time. You could easily test this btw to see how for a first view the two would compete to each other.

[LesleyPaone]

When you say external cdn, is it a cdn that you control or a public repository? If you control the cdn and you are just using it to open more channels for the browser download I would recommend setting the link in the header. From there you can set the canonical tag of the resource in the header. Here is a screenshot of the http request of my logo on my site, http://screencast.com/t/rQoiVIo8deZ5  It is getting the file from the cdn, but it is also telling search engines that the canonical location of the file is on my domain. This is something Google has supported for a while now, http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/06/supporting-relcanonical-http-headers.html

If you are using a public repository, you do not have control over the header, so I would not worry too much about it.