Proper CDN Implementation
-
I am working with a site that is using the Cloudflare CDN to deliver their images. The problem is that the URLs for the images are all cloudflare URLs (cloudflare.com/example-filename.png). We want to use a cname to change the image URLs to be on a subdomain of their site to take advantage of the SEO strength.
Currently, they get a high percentage of traffic from image search and Google is directing users to their site when returning images hosted on Cloudflare, so I am apprehensive about making changes. I'm curious if anyone has any experience with this or has any insight on how Google will handle it.
Will the longer term benefits out way any short term drop in traffic from image search? WIll there be a drop in image search?
Any thoughts or experiences are appreciated.
Thanks in advance.
-
Hi Lisa
This is interesting.
As far as I can tell, everything is configured 100% correctly.
Few questions:
1. Do you keep all images in /sites/default/files/?
Were all (most) of your errors related to items using that path?2. This could be a downtime issue. Did you experience any availability problems?
3. Do you see any changes in the error report? (different results for the same URL)
If so, this makes my downtime theory more plausible.Also, the site loaded VERY slowly for me.
I've run Google Page speed and saw that you have issue with Cache headers (low expiration date that makes it harder to leverage local and CDN caching capabilities)
This should be looked at. Beyond the immediate ux and seo implications, this can contribute to server load and can be have a negative effect on website's availability. (i.e. the above mentioned downtime)
Best
Igal
-
Igal-
Related question. We just moved to a CDN for our images. Our site is www.mnn.com and our CDN is http://images.mnn.com/. The only thing we’re allowing Google to crawl are the images, so we shouldn’t have any duplicate content issues.
However, what I AM seeing is several thousand warnings in Google Webmaster Tools for our video sitemap. Our video sitemap contains about 618 videos, but we have 2,472 errors citing “Sitemap contains urls which are blocked by robots.txt” which I believe is related to the video icons in search.
When I look for a video in Google, I still see our icons related. I can’t seem to figure this one out.
Any thoughts?
Lisa
-
I`ve recently covered this in a blog post about SEO & CDN Myth busting. The short answer is "No", as Google is well aware of CDN structures.
I think the image traffic drop is un-related and it may have something to do with Bot Blocking features that prevent access from Google Image bot (which, as we recently discovered, can use non-US IPs and thus may also be considered as "fake" ).Having said that, Google official statement says that speed factors only affect 1% of SERP results. If your image traffic is high or/and valuable I would re-think this.
-
The typical way of doing this is to setup a subdomain, specifically for the content that is going to be served from a CDN, and then use a CNAME to map the ugly CDN url to the clean subdomain that you setup. I've only done this with Rackspace and AWS. If you want a good description of how this is done on AWS, see this link:
http://www.labnol.org/internet/setup-content-delivery-network-with-amazon-s3-cloudfront/5446/
Apparently, cloudflare has a way to map your website url to the CDN, as long as you're hosting with a cloud server system that they support. I haven't tried this before, but it might actually be a cleaner way of doing this, if you're hosting setup supports it.
http://blog.cloudflare.com/zone-apex-naked-domain-root-domain-cname-supp
It sounds like this would be a big win for your client, as they get a large percentage of traffic from image traffic. Using a CDN service is going to improve the speed of loading images and reduce their bandwidth bill, and mapping the CNAME should give their domain the credit for being the source of the image.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Did We Implement Structured Data Correctly?
Our designer/developer recently implemented structured data on our pages. I'm trying to become more educated on how it works since I'm the SEO marketing specialist on the team and the one that writes and publishes the majority of our content. I'm aware it's extremely important and needs to be done, I just don't know how to do it yet. The developer was on our team for over a year, we recently let him go. Now, I'm going through all the pages to make sure it's done correctly. I'm using the structured data testing tool to look at the pages and have been playing with the structured data markup helper. I would REALLY appreciate it if one of my fellow MOZ fans & family can help me determine if it's done correctly. We do not currently have any schema plugs installed that I know of. So I'm not sure how he implemented the Schema code. I would like to know what I need to do moving forward to the additional content we publish as well as what to do to correctly implement Schema if not already. When I manually look at one of our FAQ pages I see multiple schema data formats detected... I'm not sure if we're supposed to have multiple or just one----> https://www.screencast.com/t/TjHphL7jsI I also noticed in the Question schema data for that same page... the accepted answer is empty. I would image that should have the short version of the answer to the question in it?--->https://www.screencast.com/t/e6ppXkhXd7QS Here's a screenshot of our structured data info from Google search console---> https://www.screencast.com/t/KHj4BGgdrZ4m HELP please! Our website consists of 25-30 "product" pages https://www.medicarefaq.com/medigap/ https://www.medicarefaq.com/medicare-supplement/ https://www.medicarefaq.com/medigap/plan-f/ https://www.medicarefaq.com/medicare-supplement/plan-f/ We currently have about 75 FAQ pages and adding 4-6 per month. This is what brings in most our traffic. https://www.medicarefaq.com/faqs/2018-top-medicare-supplement-insurance-plans/ https://www.medicarefaq.com/faqs/2018-medicare-high-deductible-plan-f-changes https://www.medicarefaq.com/faqs/medicare-guaranteed-issue-rights We have 100 state specific pages (two for each state) https://www.medicarefaq.com/medicare-supplement/florida/ https://www.medicarefaq.com/medigap/florida/ https://www.medicarefaq.com/medicare-supplement/California/ https://www.medicarefaq.com/medigap/California/ We have 20ish carrier specific pages https://www.medicarefaq.com/medicare-supplement/humana/ https://www.medicarefaq.com/medicare-supplement/mutual-of-omaha/ Then we have about 30 blog pages so far and are publishing new blog posts weekly https://www.medicarefaq.com/blog/average-age-retirement-rising/ https://www.medicarefaq.com/blog/social-security-benefit-increase-announced-2018 https://www.medicarefaq.com/blog/new-california-bill-force-drugmakers-explain-price-hikes
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LindsayE0 -
Hreflang implementation issue
We are currently handling search for a global brand www.example.com which has presence in many countries worldwide. To help Google understand that there is an alternate version of the website available in another language, we have used “hreflang” tags. Also, there is a mother website (www.example.com/global) which is given the attribution of “x-default” in the “hreflang” tag. For Malaysia as a geolocation, the mother website is ranking instead of the local website (www.example.com/my) for majority of the products. The code used for “hreflang” tag execution, on a product page, being: These “hreflang” tags are also present in the XML sitemap of the website, mentioning them below: <loc>http://www.example.com/my/product_name</loc> <lastmod>2017-06-20</lastmod> Is this implementation of “hreflang” tags fine? As this implementation is true across all geo-locations, but the mother website is out-ranking me only in the Malaysia market. If the implementation is correct, what could be other reasons for the same ranking issue, as all other SEO elements have been thoroughly verified and they seem fine.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Starcom_Search0 -
Website not coming up properly on Google
Hello, our website (http://www.roguevalleymicro.com/index.php) is not coming up properly on Google search (for example, when you search for Rogue Valley Microdevices on Google). We believe that there is something wrong with the website source code, and Google cannot index it properly. However, your Crawl Test results did not indicate any such problems. Can someone help us with some advice please?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | medved441 -
Organic keywords have dropped significantly in a short time period when relaunching site, but all 301 redirects are working properly.
We redesigned a site and relaunched it on the same domain. All 301 redirects were completed and are working properly. Around the same time, they fired an seo company who was published inbound links to their site on spammy directories (and this was during the same time period that Google's Hummingbird algorithm change took place). After the website relaunch, their keyword rankings fell off dramatically; and in all of our research, we're not seeing what has caused this issue. I'm not seeing any red flags in their moz reports or even in their google analytics traffic; but organic keywords are way down, and now leads from organic traffic are also way down. Help??
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | grapevinemktg0 -
.Create and implement rich snippets
How to create better rich snippets and where to place HTML code in the web page.If anyone answer with example on webpage location of code that would make me understand eaisly.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alick3000 -
What is the proper way to display e-commerce product guides? PDF / JPG?
Hi, On each product page in my e-commerce site, I have a link to show a certificate of authenticity for the product. (similar to any guide in an e-commerce site). I also have the details as plain text on the page, but this is required. What is the correct way to show it, using PDF or JPG? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet0 -
What are the best way to get a new subdomain ranked properly
Our main site (blog with 700 high quality articles) ranks pretty well and we recently launced a rapidly growing forum (55.000 posts in the first 11 weeks) on a subdomain. What would be a good strategy for ranking the forum quickly
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | xpd1 -
How to Implement Massive SEO Modifications
Hi everyone, I'm implementing some fairly significant changes on a clients website and wanted to know if it was better to implement all the changes at once or if I should implement the changes gradually. The changes are: 1. Amended information architecture 2. Completely new URL's 3. New meta data and some new on page content 4. Meta robots 'no index, follow' approximately 90% of the site Can I make all these changes in one go (that would be my preference), or should I gradually implement? What are the risks? Many thanks James
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jamesjackson1