Will using a service such as Akamai impact on rankings?

[wojkwasi]

Howdy

My client has a .com site they are looking at hosting via Akamai - they have offices in various locations, e.g UK, US, AU, RU & in some Asian countries.

If they used Akamai, would the best approach be to set up seperate sites per country:

• .co.uk
• .com
• .com.au
• .ru
• .sg etc

Although my understanding is that Googlebot is located in the US so if it crawled any of those sites it would always get a US IP address?

So is the answer perhaps to go with Akamai for the .com only which should target the US market and use different / seperate C class hosts for the others?

Thanks!

Woj

[RyanKent]

Akamai offers numerous services. Are you referring to their Content Delivery Network? If so, then the CDN will provide faster page load times which is a good user experience. If your site was being penalized for slow load times (only a small percentage of sites fall into this category) then yes, by properly setting up your content on a CDN you can remove the penalty which would improve rankings. Otherwise you would not directly benefit in terms of rankings, but your users will likely find your site more usable, explore more, etc. which could benefit your rankings.

With respect to your site design, I would recommend a single .com site with folders for each country. mysite.com/ru for russia, mysite.com/au for australia, etc. This method will allow you to collect all your domain authority in a single site and can greatly reduce your software and site maintenance expenses.

[wojkwasi]

Thanks Ryan!

I guess my main concern is to not have existing rankings penalised. For example, the head office is based in Australia with other offices around the world - if Googlebot comes in from the US and gets a US IP.. would Australian rankings drop?

Also, I believe the content being served will be identical to all regions.. for now at least.

[RyanKent]

Google effectively crawls all types of sites from around the world. As long as you offer proper navigation with your site, there shouldn't be any issue.

Your content for each region should have a landing page for that region. mysite.com/jp would be your landing page for Japan, etc. Your landing pages would be treated as your home page for Japanese speakers. You should have links from Japanese companies to the /jp page as if it was your site's home page.

[wojkwasi]

Thanks, makes perfect sense

[SapientRazorfish_]

Ryan,

What about when images are handled through Akamai and the URL's to those images are "Akamaized". Since the images are not hosted on the www.mysite.com, but on www.akamai.com, how would this effect image search. Does it take my images out of the mix. Would an image sitemap help with this?

[RyanKent]

My understanding of how a CDN is configured is it's a back-end server change. The HTML will still appear as mysite.com/image.jpg but when a request for that image is made, your server will tell the user's browser to fetch it from cdn.chicago.akamai.com/mysite.com/image.jpg.

Your server still hosts the image and is the primary source of the image. That image is duplicated on CDN servers throughout the country and world depending on what cdn plan you purchase.

So in short, the images are hosted on mysite.com and images should not be taken out of the mix. You can confirm this by checking well known sites which use Akamai:

cbsnews.com

washingtonpost.com

facebook.com