Does an content Delivery Network Hurt Your SEO?
The idea of CDN in conjunction with SEO at the same time is an incredibly difficult one. A CDN could be a major benefit to SEO but it could also cause a lot of harm to your website as it all boils down to the configuration. – Content Delivery Hurt Seo
What is a CDN? CDN works
A Content delivery network is kind of an enhancement or superpower for your site. It’s a method to make a monthly $10 web hosting service appear like a package that costs $100 per month. What is it exactly, and what exactly is it? – Content Delivery Hurt Seo
If you own a website it can be found on a server run by your web host. The server of the host could be physically situated in one place, or have multiple mirrors in the nation or across the globe The results are similar. If someone wishes to load your site and sends a request to the server hosting the website and it responds with the information about the website. – Content Delivery Hurt Seo
This works fine in the event that, for example you have a data centre located in Utah and the user is located in Ohio. However, it is not a problem when the user is located in Florida. It’s a bit less well if the user’s located in Panama or more so when they’re located in China. The further you are from the location and geographically, the longer messages take to be sent between them. – Content Delivery Hurt Seo
This is particularly relevant for international traffic. Traffic coming from Asia must pass through various regional servers, and then either through cables or satellites across the ocean, to the server located in Utah and to return to Utah with the data. Depending on the configuration and time it is quite easy for a request to be lost, to be delayed or fail to load. Even under ideal conditions it may take a considerable time to load. – Content Delivery Hurt Seo
A content delivery network is an internet-connected network that includes hundreds or even dozens of servers spread across the globe. When a person calls your website, it responds with two elements: the text and data, as well as instructions for pulling the scripts and/or media out of the CDN. The user’s browser follows these instructions and requests the CDN to download the media.
Instead of downloading 100 MB of videos or images from Utah in the scenario, the user in Japan downloads 1.5 MB of information directly from the Utah server and the remaining data comes from the CDN server in Japan. It speeds up loading. – Content Delivery Hurt Seo
For instance, take an overview of the Amazon CloudFront CDN infrastructure. There is a map available on their website’s details page that shows dots in which servers are in place. Customers who seek information through their CDN will be directed to the closest CDN server that is able to provide the data as swiftly as is feasible. This is fast enough to handle everything from scripts and images to livestreamed videos from services like Twitch. – Content Delivery Hurt Seo
It is the SEO Benefits of Content Delivery Networks
This is just an exaggeration of the actual scenario obviously. It’s not the most sophisticated however it’s close to the basic idea that you can understand how it could speed the web browsing experience for people across the globe. How does this affect the SEO of your site? – Content Delivery Hurt Seo
In the first place, the speed at which pages load is an index of search rankings. If it is taking longer to load your site the more sluggish your website will appear in search results. – Content Delivery Hurt Seo
The fact is it is possible that using a CDN can speed up the loading of the media that you have on your site However, that speed increase could affect your company. It’s worth looking deeper to learn more about. – Content Delivery Hurt Seo
In an imaginary data centre located in Utah and the surrounding areas to Utah will enjoy the highest speeds. Users who live in more remote parts of the country such as Seattle, New York City, Miami – might have difficulty loading the website, however they’ll still be able to be able to load it quickly. If you have the use of a CDN the speed at which this page loads may increase, but not more than just a few milliseconds. – Content Delivery Hurt Seo
Milliseconds may not seem like a lot but. It’s not likely to be the sole element that makes the difference between the search results of #3 or even the top spot. Google’s American Google version Google also likely to not be affected by the increased speed. – Content Delivery Hurt Seo
On the other hand those who access the internet from outside of the country especially those from overseas will experience a significantly greater improvement in speed of loading. It’s much quicker to load a video from Germany when the video comes from the server located in Germany as opposed to a server located that is located in Utah. – Content Delivery Hurt Seo
In turn, you’ll notice a bigger impact on other version of Google. Users searching from other sites will experience a more significant reduction in loading times, possibly even full minutes of time taken off massive media files such as videos. This will result in an even more dramatic shift and could have more impact on ranking in search results. – Content Delivery Hurt Seo
It’s your responsibility to assess the value of this. If you’re only serving North America with your shop it doesn’t matter what you look like in German Google as they’re not potential customers and certainly not. However If you’re an information website or affiliate marketer or even someone who ships internationally using CDN CDN can provide a significant increase in sales. – Content Delivery Hurt Seo
In certain situations, a CDN can enhance the security of your site. What I mean by this is that CDNs can be used to serve media in HTTPS. CDN can provide media via HTTPS even though your entire site does not use SSL encryption. We’ve written extensively about the use of SSL and also as discussed the potential risks of the site-wide SSL use however modern advancements to the HTTP/2 protocol as well as in SSL parsing have lowered certain dangers. – Content Delivery Hurt Seo
Google has announced that the use of SSL can be beneficial in search rankings and, while the advantage isn’t huge but it’s still an advantage. SSL on your media can helps to prevent malicious man-in the-middle attacks, injection of code or other corrupted media that is served via a scam pass-through.
A third benefit could be the speedier indexing of images. Image search on Google’s site indexes photos on the basis of their meta information and certain image analysis done by robots and spot-checked humans. It is possible to get a significant amount of traffic using this method particularly as Google has recently deleted from its search results the “view the image” button, and is now requiring users to go to the page the image is displayed on. For certain sites it can be an enormous benefit. But for other sites, maybe not as much. If you rely on images for the majority of your traffic and you’re using a CDN, the use of a CDN will allow them to show up quicker and load quicker, and be more prominent in the results of searches.
The fourth benefit offered by companies such as Cloudflare The fourth benefit, which is promoted by Cloudflare and other services like Cloudfl DDoS security. A denial of attack on a service occurs when huge amounts of users, usually bots, attempt to access your server. They will typically make requests for websites with a lot of media if they are able to discover them, in order to bombard servers with demands, overburden the server and slow down the website.
Because an CDN serves you with your content, bulk of the work of the DDoS attack is redirected to CDN servers, instead of your own servers. The CDN will then take anti-DDoS measures, which could temporarily blacklist IP addresses or block the loading your website to regions in the region that issue the requests as well as other. Additionally the CDN can record information on DDoSing and botnets and then combine that data to provide information to the security community around the world that you’re not likely to be able to do on your own or through your webhosting service when you’re trying to stop the server from burning.
CDNs could be at risk of issues
There are many benefits of making use of CDNs. There are many benefits to using a CDN but there are some specific problems as well. The majority of them are due on poor setup or bad use, but they can be addressed.
In the beginning, you could have security issues that cross-sites. This is most likely to occur in the event that you’re using SSL on your website however you’re not making use of SSL on your CDN. A CDN may use encryption to protect the content it serves to non-encrypted sites but not vice versa. If your website is encrypted but using unencrypted media, browsers will give an alert. This is especially problematic in the event that your CDN forwards scripts the cross-site scripting warning typically hinders the loading of a site completely.
Additionally, a malfunctioning CDN could lead to duplicate content problems. It’s not very common! Nearly every CDN has a process for canonicalization of hosting content. In the simplest case they’ve provided instructions for users to follow to complete it. If you’re experiencing duplication issues or the Panda penalization from Google it’s likely that you can resolve it with just a few configuration options.
Thirdly the CDN may delay loading your website. This happens when you have render-blocking media connected to the CDN. The user basically polls your server for information on how for a page to load, then begins loading the page, but must wait for the CDN to respond before the site fully loads.
This could be a sign of inadequate application of CDN. When loading scripts or media, you’ll need that they be loaded at a time that is asynchronous. This is true regardless of whether you’re using an CDN or not. It’s not ideal for the content in your post the wait until an embed video is able to download before the text is displayed isn’t it? The slow loading of content is crucial regardless of whether you’re using a CDN or otherwise.
A fourth factor to consider is the cost of an CDN. These have a reasonable price. Amazon’s CloudFront is free to customers with less than 50GB of data transferred and less than 2 million monthly requests. For pricing on demand, it’s approximately 8.5 cents for 10 Terabytes of data transferred that’s a bargain.
But that, every expense is greater than nothing. If you’re on a budget that isn’t the greatest and you’re not able to afford the extra cost of an CDN isn’t something you’d like to spend. However when you experience an increase in traffic and your website host is an bandwidth camp or bandwidth camp, the CDN could be less expensive than the fees your web host charges you. It’s definitely something worth considering.
Of course, there are free CDN alternatives. We’ve written regarding the options on this page. A free CDN isn’t as powerful or effective as a premium CDN but they’re an option for those who want something and you think it’s superior to nothing.
A fifth concern about CDNs is using a different domain for media. If your site is www.example.com, but your images are all coming from example.CDNDomain.com, some users become skeptical about the content. Other sites may have cross-site content blocked. For the majority of modern CDNs you can assign the domain you own to CDN. It’s basically an individual subdomain using CDN.example.com which means that everything appears like it’s loaded from your website. This isn’t a major issue except for a handful of people who are both technical enough to spot the issue but not skilled enough to know that it’s not an issue.
As you see, almost each and every drawback that can be associated with the use of a CDN can be reduced by the right configuration. If you’re experiencing issues there’s a way to identify and resolve it, not an excuse to stop using the CDN.
There’s a potential issue with some CDNs, and in particular CloudFlare. CloudFlare is mostly used as a DDoS protection tool, but also it’s a CDN second. There have been some problems in the past when massive DDoS attacks are taking place and anyone who is using CloudFlare during that time could be negatively affected. They are somewhat over-zealous in their IP blocking, and could restrict legitimate users too. But, it’s not really an CloudFlare issue and not necessarily a problem that’s common.
The biggest issue using the CDN is that it’s the poor CDN. If you choose one that isn’t able to provide an uptime that is reliable it’s like selecting a website host which doesn’t offer reliable uptime. You’re probably choosing a service simply because it’s inexpensive, and not because it’s worth the money and you’ll be suffering because of it. Make sure you choose a reputable CDN provider, either cheap or not make sure you configure it correctly and enjoy the benefits.
