Are CDNs good or bad for SEO? This technology not only boosts the speed of content delivery, but also brings about some search optimization benefits. Find out which ones.

It is widely known that website loading time influences search ranking. If you want to increase SEO of your website, you should consider page loading time, as Google states it matters a lot. CDN can optimize page speed and improve SEO to a high degree.

What is a CDN (Content Delivery Network)?

Contact Delivery Networks (CDNs) are systems of servers that deliver web pages and web content based on visitor’s geographical locations. With a CDN, you can transfer a large amount of content quickly and without interruptions. To understand how CDN works, consider the following example.

Say, your website is based in New York. Then the people accessing it from San Francisco will get the content faster than people accessing it from Beijing. The further the person opening website or application is, the longer it takes for a website to open.

CDNs have become a must for businesses that want to cover Internet users globally. Such technology gives websites an opportunity to reach end-users anywhere around the globe in a matter of seconds. So if you want to outperform your competitors, fast speed should be a priority for your business. You will both improve user experience and boost SEO metrics.

How does CDN Work?

CDN is a system of servers often referred to as “PoPs” (points of presence). Every server is located in some strategic point (location), and servers can be scattered across multiple regions or countries. A server located close to visitors is called “edge server”. When a user opens a website or an application and requests for some content, he is connected to the closest edge server to ensure brilliant experience.

Some of the benefits of using a CDN include:

1. Faster loading of content on your site (including mobile websites).


2. Reduction of image size and image compression improves performance.


3. Session optimization reduces the number of open connections to your server.


4. Quick scaling during traffic surge.


5. Minimal risk of traffic spikes hurting website performance means better stability.


6. Better customer experience.

With CDN, you can cache website content to have it delivered form edge server to user quicker than if it was delivered from the origin. This way, the content requested travels from the nearest PoP and back instead of going all way long from website’s origin server and back.

One more advantage of CDN is that it renews (purges) content regularly, so visitors get current versions of content, even if it is cached. Such process is called “content invalidation”.

How do CDNs Help SEO?

With CDN, you boost speed and quality of content delivered to the visitor, but it’s not the only reason to implement it. In fact, SEO factors are not constricted to speed and content delivery efficiency. There are some technical aspects that influence SEO, too.

For instance, CDN ensures that each version of your website across several servers and location is identical. CDNs apply caching algorithms and canonical headers to enhance SEO and preventing content duplicating across content creation issues. CDNs purge content, so its freshest versions of content are loaded, and that concerns every cached version of website.

How CDNs Make Your Site Safer?

Having website loaded from several locations or servers not only improves website health, but also brings a huge SEO benefit. The risk of attacks on your website decreases, because servers are placed over different geographical locations. With multiple servers you also prevent website crashingL loading time is divided over several servers.

Should I deploy a CDN in my online business?

CDNs can bring about benefits for anyone hosting a website or a mobile application requested by numerous users at a time. Content delivery networks are especially helpful for websites with a lot of content of different formats and sizes, and complex websites with visitors from numerous geographical locations.

However, if you’re going to implement a CDN, do it correctly. Contact professionals who can help you with that, because an incorrectly implemented CDN can hurt your site’s usability and SEO.