SEO professionals dread telling their clients that their website is slow & unwieldy, and it is because of their content-the one thing on which they spent a lot of time, money, & effort.
This is where a Content Delivery Network or CDN comes in.
It is a known fact that a website’s load time impacts its search engine ranking. Even Google has admitted that page speed matters. CDNs can optimize page speed and help a website work better.
Why is ranking important? Because websites in the top position get maximum traffic. According to Bing, the website in the top position gets 42% of the total traffic, the website in the second position gets only 11% of the total traffic and the website in the third position gets 8%.
Since Content Delivery Network has shown immense positive impact, the global CDN market is expected to grow from $14.4 billion in 2020 to a whopping $27.9 billion in 2025.
What are Content Delivery Networks?
CDNs are a geographically distributed system of servers worldwide that deliver web content, including web pages, video streaming, etc., at a faster speed. They help larger quantities of data to reach anywhere on the map quickly without interruptions.
How does using a CDN work?
The process is straightforward. Once a user requests a page, any page, from a website, the request reaches the nearest CDN node. Then the requested content gets delivered from the cached content of the CDN’s Points of Presence (PoPs), or simply put, data centers.
How a Content Delivery Network (CDN) can help SEO?
CDNs reduce request-to-delivery times significantly. So much so that a website’s performance changes tenfold after CDNs usage.
Amazon found that every 100 milliseconds of latency cost them 1% in sales. It also reduces consumer interest and deteriorates customer experience. CDNs can help users get a better customer experience even with lower bandwidth.
While reducing latency, CDNs also minimize packet loss, helping speed up end-user content delivery.
Some other features of the CDN also help with SEO. Through the use of caching algorithms and canonical headers, CDNs can help resist duplicate content. This, in turn, can help in the betterment of the SEO of a website as Google’s ranking algorithm is known to penalize websites for duplicate content.
If a website crashes during traffic peaks or suffers from a DDoS attack bringing down the website, the user experience will be shattered. Google will now look into the trustworthiness of such a website, causing it to tank in search rankings. Unless such a situation is tended to very soon & the website is back live, the search ranking may never improve or suffer from permanent bias. CDNs can help users avoid that altogether.
This directly affects SEO.
CDNs can also help in image optimization, and this helps image SEO. Any page with images will load faster, and the image will get higher results for image search, increased conversions, heightened security, reduced cost in the long run, and much more.
From session reuse to TCP connection pools to network peering, CDN uses multiple ways for session optimization.
CDN takes the guessing game out of the picture. Brands or businesses can easily adjust the actions based on immediate requirements. This reduces the overall cost of maintenance & purchase of additional resources.
Beyond this, CDN also adds an extra layer of security to a website. It does it by ensuring security encryption & transfer, well-distributed data, a fairly current SSL, and well-balanced traffic loads.
SEO best practices for CDN
- Use your own subdomain to set up CDN. This will ensure that you have the rights to the CDN service. It will also point to the SEO values of the CDN based on your own root domain. This increases authority scores, boosts rankings, and improves page speed.
- Be completely consistent with file names & their paths. This will ensure that a user won’t meet with a 404 error by clicking on a pre-CDN link of your website.
- Use Webmaster tools to ensure that search engines do not mistakenly target your CDN’s geographical location instead of yours.
- Use Rel=Canonical tags to avoid duplicate content.
Common issues to watch out for in CDN implementation
We knew you were waiting for the other shoe to drop. CDN can’t be all good. Well, it does come with a few minor drawbacks. They do come with fairly simple solutions to them, but if you’re going to shift to CDN, these are the things you should watch out for.
- Most websites integrate with CDNs without any hassle. However, if you’ve gone into custom, it might be a little difficult to get it configured on a custom setup. However, with a dedicated developer mediation, this tiny hurdle can be easily overcome.
- CDN is not a hosting platform. So, it will be an added cost with an existing hosting server. But, with a strategic budget, this won’t be an issue.
- Most network providers are absolutely okay with CDNs. But very few of them may block the CDN. Some of the most common culprits are Microsoft Ajax CDN related to jQuery, according to Reddit threads. However, there are workarounds for these issues.
- In the case of a CDN using a third-party geo-mapping database, the end-user can be assigned the wrong IP address sometimes. You have to be in contact with your CDN provider from the setup process and throughout the usage to ensure this doesn’t happen.
Closing up
CDNs play an important role in optimizing web page speed. This, in turn, impacts search ranking. CDNs are great for better SEO. From higher brand recognition to better customer experience, CDN can offer a plethora of benefits. When correctly implemented, CDN can be your website’s best friend. If you want more information about how CDNs affect SEO or need help in implementing CDN, you can always consult with an expert like MMBO, a top SEO Agency in Delhi.
Note:
MMBO is a reputed SEO agency in Delhi. We have a team of SEO experts, experienced marketers, web developers, eCommerce specialists, and creative content creators. After doing in-depth research on the impact of CDN on SEO, we have come up with this detailed blog. We work continuously in developing our understanding of the evolution of CDNs while benefiting SEO. We’ve helped multiple brands, big & small, utilize CDNs in the best way possible, and we hope to do the same in the future.
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