John Mueller from Google was questioned on the advantages of hosting on a content delivery network (CDN). The simple answer is no; there is no additional advantage to hosting on a CDN as long as your host is quick.
According to John Mueller, if your crawl activity is sluggish and you have millions of pages, employing a CDN or a faster host might enhance crawling and indexing, which indirectly affects your ranks and therefore SEO.
And yet John added “In terms of SEO, I don’t believe that would have much of an impact on Google. The only consequence that I can contemplate is what users ultimately experience.” If your server is already quick, he said, “that is not something that counts in terms of SEO.”
In the video from last Friday, he mentioned this at the 2:50 mark:
Does putting a website behind a CDN improve ranking? We get the majority of our traffic from a specific country. We posted our website on a server located in that country. Do you suggest putting our entire website behind a CDN to improve page speed for users globally or is that not required?
So obviously you can do a lot of these things, I don’t think it would have a big affect on Google at all in regards to SEO. The only affect that I can imagine that something might happen is what users end up seeing.
And kind of what you mentioned, if the majority of your users are already seeing a very fast site website because your server is located there, then you are kinda of doing the right thing. But if of course if users in other locations are seeing a very slow result, because perhaps the connection to your country is not that great, then that is something you might have some opportunity to improve on. And you could see that as something kind of an opportunity in the sense that of course if your web site is really slow for other users, then it is going to be rare for them to go to your web site more often because it is really annoying to get there. Whereas if your web site is pretty fast for other users then at least they have an opportunity to see a reasonably fast web site which can be your web site.
So from that point of view there is something you can do improve your web site globally, then I think that is a good idea. I don’t think it is critical, it is not something that matters in terms of SEO, in that Google has to see a very quick site as well. But it is something that you can do to grow your website past just your current country.
Maybe one thing I should clarify, if Google’s crawling is really really slow then of course that can affect how much we can crawl and index the site. So that can an aspect to look into to. The majority of website I looked into, I do not see this as being a problem, with regards to any web site that isn’t millions and millions of pages large. So from that point of view, you can double check how fast Google is crawling in Search Console, in crawl stats and if that looks reasonable, even if it is not super fast, than I wouldn’t worry about that.
The text is as follows:
Forum discussion at YouTube Community.
