Google Says No SEO Benefit To Hosting On A CDN

Google’s John Mueller was asked if there is an SEO benefit to hosting on a CDN, a content delivery network. The short answer is no, as long as your host is fast, then you are fine – there is no added benefit to hosting on a CDN.

John Mueller added that if your crawl activity is slow and you have millions and millions of pages, speeding up your host or using a CDN can improve crawling and indexing, which indirectly impacts your rankings and thus SEO.

But John said “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.” He added “it is not something that matters in terms of SEO” if your server is fast already.

He said this at the 2:50 mark in last Friday’s video:

Here is the transcript:

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.

Forum discussion at YouTube Community.