When the topic itself starts with a question, the one thought that comes in the reader’s mind is if this is going to end up in favor or against of the same. Well, let’s see which side this will turn to.
So the question is ‘does CDN really helps in search engine rankings?’ and for you to know the answer you have read the article first. So go ahead!
Before we proceed, we need to know:
What CDN stands for and what does it mean?
CDN (Content Delivery Network) is a system of servers distributed throughout the world delivering web pages, and other web content based on the users’ geographical location. So to deliver a large amount of content without any delay and interruption, we use CDN.
For example, your website is hosted on a server located in London. When someone tries to access it from India, the content and web pages will be delivered from London based server. The long distance between London and India can slow down the process which can increase the load time. Now, imagine that the same visitor access your website but this time the content is delivered from a server located in India itself. That’s what a CDN does.
How does it work and what are its benefits?
A connection from the closest server – that’s how it works.
CDNs are made up of a network of servers also called point of presence or POPs which are spread across the world in different locations. Individual server under CDN is known as Edge server. If someone wants to access a website, then that user will be connected to the closest edge server.
This process can help the user to save a lot of time to load the page and download any of them. Hence, it provides better site performance and customer experience and also ensures the stability of your website by minimizing the risk of traffic increasing at the point of origination. It hosts images & other static content and ensures that it gets delivered at the user’s end as fast as possible.
Pros of CDN:
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Reduce Load Time and Bounce Rate:
As CDN deliver content from a server located near the visitor, it can deliver web pages faster than normal web servers. Non-CDN servers handle all the (worldwide) requests from a single location. Delivering content from a nearby location can reduce the delivery time (and the page loading time) by a huge margin. As page loading time is one of the ranking factors, CDNs can play an important role in your SEO efforts.
Also, Analytics shows that visitors browse more pages on faster websites. “More browsing” means low bounce rate which is also an important ranking factor.
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Saving on Bandwidth Costs:
A CDN host copies of your content and deliver it from its own servers known as Edge Servers. In the process, your main server or primary host gets a less number of requests. Less number of requests means low bandwidth usage and low bandwidth usage means savings on hosting costs.
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Ensure Content Availability:
A CDN is designed and developed to handle heavy traffic and hardware/software failures. So in such situations, it makes sure that your website is up and visitors don’t face any problem in browsing the website’s content.
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SSL Certificate:
SSL certificate is an essential part of websites these days. Even the browsers have made it mandatory for your websites to work properly. A CDN can provide this feature even if your main host is not configured to do so.
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Security:
During cyber attacks, which can affect the performance of a website or can leak out its information, CDN can play a savior’s role. A CDN can provide better security by implementing techniques like DDoS mitigation. It can also apply various security certificates alongside other security optimizations to make sure your website survives the attack.
Cons of CDN:
I can’t find many cons of using CDN. The two most significant cons that I think can affect your website in some way are listed below:
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Link Juice/SEO:
As files are hosted under a different URL or subdomain on a CDN, they may act like external links on your web pages. Why would you pour out the link juice to external links? However, the issue may not sound that big for a few SEO experts here, but it is a reality.
Many experts suggest optimizing/resizing images and other content instead of hosting them on a CDN.
What’s your take on that?
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Misconfiguration:
Although all CDN services come with advanced and easy setup, chances of misconfigurations are always there. Once misconfigured, websites hosted on CDNs can become dead or other technical problems may come across. One of the most common issues with CDNs is “Redirect Loop” which arises when SSL is misconfigured. However, this is not very common, the possibility of a misconfiguration is not zero.
Other Aspects of CDN:
In today’s era, it is very important for the marketers and website owners to achieve better rankings in the SERPs. With everything which has been changing over the years, maintaining a spot on the top results needs equally smart and updated strategies. Whether it is the constant changes Google apply on itself, ad placements or introduction of lots of new digital marketing techniques, these algorithms will keep changing from time to time.
Adopting a Content Delivery Network(CDN) can be an easy way to achieve high websites’ speed as compared to just optimizing the content.
Many people do wonder that how CDNs make your Website safer. If you are having fever and you have consulted to more than one doctor or even more than two and they have checked you differently as per their skills, but still you will feel safer, better than you felt after consulting the first Doctor. That is because you will be assured of your health.
Same goes for CDN, having the site load from different servers from different locations will improve the site’s health along with speed factor it provides to its users.
As multiple servers are located in multiple geographical locations it decreases the risk of attack on your site.
Also if many people are accessing the site from different locations and different servers then your Website will be prevented from crashing as the load time will be divided among various users.
Conclusion:
CDNs can bring out a lot of benefits for a Website that is to be requested by many users providing multiple servers. Websites which have varied content types, have a lot of content and have complex web page structures with users from worldwide through different servers. As discussed above the main characteristic of CDN is to improve the speed and thus increase the search ranking.
But on the other hand there are still many of you who knows the benefits of using it, but not the proper or correct way to utilize to its best, do you? Many people use CDNs but some of them achieve their goal others do not, what can be the possible reason only one- they don’t know about its implementation.
However, you should avoid using low-quality CDN services. A lot of webmasters, in efforts to save monthly costs, choose cheap CDN services without focussing much on the features and quality. Such tactics can be harmful in long run.
So there is only one suggestion and that is to know the proper way to work out with CDNs or to contact a professional who can help you out with the correct operation of CDN, because there is a saying that having half knowledge about something is more dangerous than having no knowledge about the same, you must have heard it too!
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