Amazon CloudFront CDN

[Max84]

Hi,

I'd like to increase website's speed with Amazon CloudFront CDN.

I created some CNAMEs and i've something like this:

• www.mydomain.com (my website)
• cdn1.mydomain.com
• cdn2..mydomain.com
• cdn3.mydomain.com

But i've a lot duplicate content now ! One per subdomain and one per content (gif, css, html, and so one).

Have you any feedback in order to not have SEO penalty ?

Does Google detects CDN ? Can I help him to understand my CDNs ?

Thanks,

Best regards,

Maxime

[KeriMorgret]

Tomorrow morning (Seattle time) I'll be posting a YouMoz blog post at http://www.seomoz.org/ugc that deals directly with setting up a CDN on Amazon. You can read through the steps given in the article and see if that answers your questions, and if not, you can ask a question in the comments.

[KeriMorgret]

Here's the YouMoz post that might help.

http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/improving-page-speed-with-amazon-web-services-a-beginners-guide

[Max84]

Great post, but he didn't talk about duplicate content, only increasing speed.

[KeriMorgret]

Did the author's reply in the comment of the blog post answer your question, or do you still have this question?

[Max84]

I think he didn't reply.

He store data onto Amazon S3 and serves pictures from CDN (Amazon CloudFront). So he told me he hasn't duplicate content issues because he serves pictures.

But he tolds too "This isn't an issue for duplicate content, unlike if you were replicating your HTML".

When you use Amazon CloudFront without Amazon S3, but you use it with your webserver, Amazon CloudFront duplicates all content (pictures, pages, ...).

Onto your website, you'll only link pictures to CDN, for example http://cdn1.test.com/picture.jpg. But if GoogleBot opens http://cdn1.test.com/ it'll find all your html content !

So it'll be a duplicate issue I think, and I don't really know what is the best way to fix that (not use Amazon CloudFront without Amazon S3, Canonical, http headers, ...)

Thanks

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Max,

As you know, SEOmoz uses a CDN (Content Delivery Network) to host our static content. This greatly improves the load time of our pages by distributing our content across a cloud network, and results in an improved experience for users.

If I understand your question correctly, you have set up a CDN and have created duplicate content issues.

To solve this, it's important to set up your CDN only to serve static content, like images, stylesheets and javascript. That is what a CDN is designed for. Do not duplicate your entire site - your HTML - as this will cause duplicate content issues.

If for some reason you need to replicate your entire HTML, then there are some steps you can take to mitigate the damage, although it's going to depend on your exact circumstances.

For example, you can set full URL canonical tags so that all your mapped CNAMES point to your primary URL.

To revert back to one copy of your HTML, you might want to put 301 redirects in place on the duplicated content (pointing to the original) before removing them from the CDN.

But even these aren't ideal solutions. It's best just to serve your static content, and only one version of your HTML.