SEO and CDNs

tb987 · Mar 15, 2008

A content delivery network, e.g. Akamai, is a reverse proxy and SE spider will always see the nearest cache of a website.

So if you have a UK website and use a gloabal cdn Google is going to think your site is hosted in the US i.e where the spiders operate from. This will affect your rankings in the UK, so how can you overcome this? Does Google work with Akamai to get a real geo-location? Has anybody got any experience of this?

BenjArriola · Mar 16, 2008

There are tons of sites hosted in the US aside from relying on CDN alone but their main location is not really in the US. But this is just one factor searching engines like Google look at in determining the location of a site. A few things you can do to strengthen you ranking in your local country's Google version, you can do some of the following:

Specifying the language code in the DTD (Document Type Declaration) For example, for English:
Code:
```
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//[B]EN[/B]" "xhtml11.dtd">
```
and also in:
Code:
```
<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en">
```
This is good for geotargeting many non-English languages. But for English, this may not be as effective as there are many English speaking countries. This includes UK and the US as well.
Using ccTLDs (Country Code Top Level Domain names)
If you want to rank higher in Google versions targeted for a specific country, it would be best to use the ccTLD of that country. Thus for UK, probably .co.uk. would be best.
Using the address tag.
Code:
```
<address>Place your address here</address>
```
The address tag is a valid HTML tag really specifying that the text within those tags is where your physical address is.
Set your location in Google Webmaster Tools. If you do not have a ccTLD and runs a TLD, you can specifically tell Google to target a specific geographic location in Google's Webmaster Tools.
Use Google Local Business Center when available. As part of Google Maps, this may be available in some locations but not everywhere, you can submit to Google your actual location and map it our in Google's Local Business Center.

I hope this would help you out.

tb987 · Mar 16, 2008

That's a great answer BenJ thanks for taking the time to provide such a detailed response - I didn't know the address tag existed!

The site in question is global and uses a gTLD as part of the online brand, country sites are in subfolders and there are ccTLDs redirecting to these. In the local searches on Google with the filter applied e.g. google.es on the ccTLD appears and the ccTLD appears.

I am guessing it is impossible to geo target different sections of a site and the local filter will always filter out the site for all but one country and your adice only applies to whole domains.

Thanks again,

Tony

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