Content Delivery Network

CDN – At a glance

Server location plays a crucial role in determining latency. Lower the latency, faster the pages will refresh. Websites that have a lower latency are able to render content faster. Since website loading speed is an essential search engine ranking factor, there is increased focus on rendering webpages in as little time as possible.

How CDN helps websites

CDN, or the content delivery network, brings the content closer to end user. The closer the content is to its destination, the faster it will be delivered. This can substantially help websites in SEO. Often times, CDN plays a big role and we have seen webpages make a big jump in rankings post CDN subscription.

CDN – Problem Statement

Consider a CDN provider with servers all over the globe. Now consider a website with server positioned somewhere in the US. When a user from Europe tries to access the website, the pages will load almost 3 times slower than it normally loads.

This extraordinarily high load-time is attributed to the increased distance between the server and the user. Such a website will undergo a lot of troubles getting their webpages to rank in Europe because of its enormous load time.

How CDN works

When you opt for content delivery network, your content is positioned on servers all around the world. Though your host server continues to remain where it once was, there will be several other content delivery host to render files.

So, the next time someone from Europe navigates through your website, website contents will be rendered through a nearby CDN and not from the host server all the way through the US. This way, you can up user engagement while keeping your budget to a bare minimum.

CDN definition

A content delivery network (CDN) is an interconnected system of computers that delivers webpages to a user based on the geographic locations of the user. It basically serves content to the end-users with high availability and high performance.

In a CDN, content remains in numerous copies on multiple servers due to the content replication for optimized speed of content delivery. With the help of this advanced tool, a website grows by streaming to thousands of visitors. Concurrently, CDN keep websites secured against the risks of attacks and enhance the performance of complex web applications.

CDN Platform examples

    - Google Cloud CDN

    - Cloudfare

    - MaxCDN

    - Cachefly

Will rankings be affected due Plagiarism on CDN?

You should have asked why I should be copying my website’s contents to third party servers, knowing google algorithms would hit me negatively for plagiarizing contents. However, what you may have failed to note than even though I am caching files to content delivery network (and all of its nodes) I am not giving off my copyright from the content.

The content is cached and not exactly copied. At all times, the cached content’s source will point out to the root of my web server and not the CDN. Thus, the search engine knows that it is not picking up a plagiarized content but only an authorized copy of files somewhere around the world. That means, you do not have to worry about getting hit with negative SEO for replication, except if you have copied the original content.

CDN Advantages – Why have a CDN?

Apart from everything you have so far read in this CDN wiki, we believe the following advantages are worth noting:

Reduced page load time of your website, which, in turn, helps improve your SEO metrics for improved search engine rankings.

Improved content redundancy – you aren’t actually copying content but are only caching it. So, you need not cache files that are not used frequently. This helps alleviate redundancy.

Enhanced data backup, archiving and storage capacity – the decreased reliance on server for storage means archiving becomes easier and storage capacity is greatly increased.

Easy delivery of video and audio rich content – the most notable enhancement is in the delivery of video and audio files. Audio and video files render almost 5 times as fast on CDN.

This is beneficial for both individuals as well as enterprises who rely on online data backup services.