Google’s Search Advocate John Mueller answers a question about whether CDNs can improve rankings in an SEO office hour video.
Mueller responded with an in-depth answer discussing page speed, crawling and addressing SEO.
Content Delivery Network (CDN)
A content delivery network (CDN) is a service that provides a global network of servers to accelerate the delivery of web pages by serving them from servers close to site visitors trying to access the web pages.
The closer a server is to a website visitor, the fewer “hops” it takes for a web page to travel across the Internet to that visitor.
This means that a CDN can significantly improve web page speed.
Do CDNs Help Search Rankings?
People who ask Google want to know if there are any ranking advantages to using a CDN over traditional server hosting.
Question asked:
“Does putting a site behind a CDN improve rankings?
Most of our traffic comes from specific countries. We host our website on servers located in this country.
Do you recommend putting our entire website behind a CDN to improve page speed for users worldwide, or is this not required in our case? “
CDN and SEO performance
Mueller replied that CDNs have no SEO effect.
Mueller replied:
“So, obviously you can do a lot of that.
I don’t think it will have much impact on Google’s SEO. “
Although Mueller said he didn’t think it would make a big difference, he did come back to it and clarify it.
Mueller continued his answer:
“The only thing I can imagine that could happen is what the user ends up seeing.
And, like you mentioned, if most of your users are already seeing a very fast website because your server is located there, then you are doing the right thing.
But of course, if users in other locations are seeing very slow results because the connection to your country might not be that great, then you might have some opportunity to improve it.
In a sense you can see it as some kind of opportunity, of course if your site is really slow for other users then it will be rare for them to start visiting your site more, Because it’s really annoying to get there.
And if your site is very fast for other users, then at least they have a chance to see a reasonably fast site, which is probably yours.
So from that perspective, if you can do something to improve the overall look of your site, I think it’s a good idea.
I don’t think it’s critical. “
CDNs and the impact on crawling
Mueller is back with SEO, this time addressing the crawling problem and the benefits of a CDN.
Mueller continued his answer:
“In terms of SEO, it’s not a big deal because Google has to see it very quickly or something like that too.
However, there are a few things you can do to make your site go beyond your current country.
Maybe I should clarify one thing, if Google’s crawl rate is really, really slow, that of course affects how well we crawl and index from the site. “
So this may be an aspect that needs to be researched.
Most of the sites I’ve looked at, I don’t really see this as an issue for anything that isn’t millions of pages large.
So, from this perspective, you can double-check Google’s crawl rate in Search Console in your crawl statistics.
If this seems reasonable, I wouldn’t really worry about it, even if it’s not very fast. “
slow or underpowered web servers, Especially in a shared server environmentmay not be able to handle the massive crawl of both legitimate and malicious bots.
This condition on a shared server can cause the server to give up and respond with a 500 server response code because the server cannot serve the requested web page.
I’ve seen this happen on shared servers where the host recommends upgrading to a dedicated or virtual server environment.
A CDN mitigates the effects of slower shared servers by serving web pages from the CDN rather than the server hosting the actual page.
CDN and Google ranking
Mueller’s answer suggests that using a CDN will not produce any kind of SEO effect.
He did say that the difficulty of crawling a site is not a common problem (except for large sites with “millions of pages”).
According to Mueller, there are many good reasons to use a CDN, but SEO benefits are not one of them.
Citation:
Watch Mueller answer questions about SEO performance and using CDNs
2:50 minute video
Featured image: Screenshot from YouTube.com/GoogleSearchCentral, June 2022.
