SEO effect on site served via CDN

[MarvinH]

I used to serve just static files (images, java, css) via CDN, but starting this morning my entire www CName is on my CDN.

My initial observations after 7 hours:

- 20% traffic drop

- While before I used to see one, maximum two, different Google spiders IPs crawing my site entire day, not it is like 15 to 20 different Google spider IPs on my site at all times.

I'm a bit worried about the initial traffic drop. Could anyone with first-hand experience share their knowledge? Is placing the entire www CName on a CDN bad for SEO? In effect my site is now being served from vatious IP numbers, depending on the location of visitors.

[deadsea]

How are you measuring that traffic drop, via client side monitoring (Google Analytics) or server side logging? If you are looking at your server logs, I would expect you to have less traffic, that is what CDN is for, it serves the traffic so that you don't have to.

Using CDN for www pages is not a common practice because it precludes customization for each user. If you content is static enough that a CDN will work for you, then I'd imagine it helps user experience by having the page served faster which should help SEO. I certainly don't have any first hand experience with such a set up though.

[MarvinH]

Deadsea, you are absolutely correct, and thanks for letting me know. I have found that my IP-related features are now not working as expected. One of the features was a widget that was showing me the number of visitors over the past 24 hours. That widget is now showing about one third of the usual number of visitors. :-(

I used to use Google Analytics in the past, and I liked it, but I stopped using it because I wanted to eliminate all unessential java scripts from my site for performance reasons. I'm not sure if I want to ad ga.js to my pages now. :-(

[mikeavery11]

First of all you should be confirm about traffic drop. Please use Google Analytic for measuring traffic.

[MarvinH]

Hi Mike, traffic did not drop. Deadsea was correct, some of my stats have been affected since traffic is now being seen as coming from the IPs of my CDN. But all is OK now. And the speed has improved slightly, too. (Finally GWT is showing the site in the "green", 1.3 sec today :-)