SEO

How CDNs Can Have a Positive Impact on SEO


This article was updated on August 6th, 2020 at 05:57 am

These days, everyone is looking to find out the ultimate “Secret” of ruling the rankings. For this reason, people are attempting every approach to be on the “#1” spot and are adopting every method that may influence their SEO campaigns in any positive way. It can be associated to aspects related to HTTP’s, going mobile, page load speed or yielding natural niche targeted links etc.

CDN & SEO

CDN & SEO

  

Moz recently published the 2015 ranking survey report in which 150 top marketing experts weighed in and voted for the factors that impact on rankings; page load time or page speed is one of the factors that they all stressed on and even Google itself accepted that, page speed does matter.

When we speak about page speed optimization, CDN’s play a vital role. Let’s analyze how CDN improves page speed that directly impacts your SEO.

What is CDN?

Page loading speed is assuming greater importance for web users, and therefore for website owners. Identical copies of websites distributed across various servers located globally, and functioning as a unified Content Delivery Network (CDN) considerably boosts page loading speeds by matching user location with the geographically nearest server for the website.

How CDN & SEO work together?

As stated above, CDN enhances both the speed and efficiency of data provision to the end user. What it also does, is help the website rank higher in search engines. Although CDN’s aren’t a “silver bullet” solution for this purpose by any means and website owner skills will come into play with regards to search engine rankings, CDN does take care of several of the technical aspects of search engine criteria.

Hosting Impacts

The geographical redundancy as compared to a single server location is a major benefit for the SEO of the website. The quicker load time of the website owing to users being routed to the most proximate server of several located globally will also help enhance the site’s health.

CDN Fights with Duplicate Content Creation Issues

Ensuring identical versions of the website across multiple servers located across the globe may appear to be a challenge, and it is. However, advanced caching algorithms and use of canonical headers is a good solution for such a concern, if and when it may arise. These techniques also further enhance the SEO of the website.
Further Read: How CDNs can help you in understanding White Fall diagrams

Improved Security with the use of CDN

Well, this one is rather obvious: geographical dispersion of servers leads to better site security, both in cases of malicious digital/physical attacks, or power or other disruptions at a particular site. In such an eventuality, network latency ensures that the remaining servers on the CDN assume the load of the compromised server location. This arrangement ensures a very high uptime for the website (5 9’s not being unusual).

Our own personal use of a CDN for our website has led us to two important conclusions:

(a) Improved usability: the bounce-rate on our site has declined considerably, accompanied by higher page views and number of pages viewed per user.

(b) Improved SEO and site’s accessibility due to CDN’s inherent optimization and faster load times.

Further Read: How CDNs can help in Mobile Marketing?

Crashing gets Eliminated

So, you published a visual content after weeks of hard work on your blog with the expectations to drive tons of traffic and shares. You’re almost close to touch your target and then your site crashes! And, everything goes down.

For this catastrophic situation, CDN’s can serve to be your Messiah. Because, it divides the load to several servers instead of one, the chances of crashing servers are most likely eliminated.

Is CDN a good investment?

I assume, you are now convinced to go for a CDN because of its amazing technical capabilities. As far as the ROI is concerned, there are several studies available which show how miraculously revenue tends to increase after the page speed is enhanced.  

Check out these researches for more:

  • 47% visitors want a web page to load in two seconds or less.
  • 57% people will leave a page that takes 3 seconds or more to open.
  • During holiday seasons, more than 75% of online buyers opted for another site rather than enduring suffer delays.

Conclusion

Using a CDN has several major benefits for a website. Summarizing those that we have discussed above,

  1. Quicker load-times and reduced loads on a particular server,
  1. Enhanced and improved SEO due to inbuilt functionality and serving speed,
  1. Improved security and website integrity.

However, like all good things, CDN’s are a twin-edged sword: If implemented, they need to be implemented RIGHT, and usually require expert assistance at the outset. If done WRONG, using a CDN can compromise your website’s SEO and usability.

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