9 replies to this topic

[Kenneth White]

Recently a company that we have been working with for our Website Redeisgn suggested we move our CSS offsite..

Does anyone know what this means, or what SEO benefit a site would be able to derive from it?

Thanks

[Randy]

Hunh?

Offsite? Or did they perhaps mean move it into an External file?

No advantage to moving it offsite. In fact it could raise some serious problems if the domain storing your css file went down or got slow for any reason.

There is an advantage on the design side of things to have it in an external file, because then you can tweak a single file and see the changes on every page of the site.

There's no SEO benefit either way though. So if they said there was they're just a little bit nuts!

[Kenneth White]

Hi Randy,

Yeah, we were all a bit confused too... we were all "Well, he is either onto something, or a complete moron!".

We think he just meant an external file. Thanks for the quick reply!

[mickmel]

There's no SEO benefit either way though. So if they said there was they're just a little bit nuts!

There is (arguably) an SEO benefit to having it in an external file -- less page bloat. Keeping JavaScript and CSS in external files keeps the HTML size much smaller, presumably helping Google digest it a bit better and give the remaining code a bit of a boost in terms of density.

I don't have hard facts to back it up, but it seems to have helped a few of my sites.

[shijk]

Recently a company that we have been working with for our Website Redeisgn suggested we move our CSS offsite..

Does anyone know what this means, or what SEO benefit a site would be able to derive from it?

Thanks

I'm not sure if this is what they mean, but there can be a performance benefit to serving static content (including css, js, images, etc) from a separate domain or better yet a server dedicated to the static content or even better still to a content delivery network (but unless you get a ton of traffic and use heavy media, a true CDN may be overkill).

If your site is example.com and you serve your css from static.example.com/ you allow the users browser to do parallel downloads of the bits and pieces that make up your webpage. Which means the site will display faster. Yahoo suggests using between 2 and 4 separate domains for a webpage.
So you could do :
example.com
js.example.com
css.example.com
images.example.com
That depends of course on how fancy you want to get and where your performance bottlenecks exist.

I don't know that there is any SEO benefit to it (I doubt it), but making your site perform better will make your users happier.

You may want to visit developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html for more on this and other way to improve performance.

You can also download yslow (developer.yahoo.com/yslow/) which will evaluate your page based on the above criteria.

Hope that helps.

Edited by Randy, 19 May 2008 - 05:50 PM.
Edited to remove live links per forum rules. ~Randy

[Randy]

The probelm with what you say Yahoo! suggests in using subdomains for css, js, images, etc is that this breaks their #2 rule. It requires multiple DNS lookups to retrieve a single page!

There are times and places to use a true content delivery network where servers are scattered throughout the world to improve performance for people around the world. That's not the same as off loading stuff to subdomains or even different domains though. Honestly, unless you're a multi-billion dollar corporation that is totally dependent upon the Internet (eg Yahoo! ) you'd be wasting your time and dollars even looking into it, let alone doing it.

And a CDN still wouldn't improve SEO, with the exception of if your server is just getting killed by traffic and can't deliver pages. If that's the case you have much, much larger problems than worrying about SEO schtuff. Neither will off loading css to a different domain, hostname or subdomain.

[shijk]

The probelm with what you say Yahoo! suggests in using subdomains for css, js, images, etc is that this breaks their #2 rule. It requires multiple DNS lookups to retrieve a single page!

Which is why they suggest between 2 and 4. Using more starts to add too much overhead and the browser wouldn't take advantage of it anyway.

There are times and places to use a true content delivery network where servers are scattered throughout the world to improve performance for people around the world. That's not the same as off loading stuff to subdomains or even different domains though. Honestly, unless you're a multi-billion dollar corporation that is totally dependent upon the Internet (eg Yahoo! lol.gif) you'd be wasting your time and dollars even looking into it, let alone doing it.

I agree that unless you're huge a CDN is probably not worth it. Although, if you're delivering heavy media (audio, video, and lots of it) then it starts to make more sense. However I would argue that by spreading content over multiple domains (particular if they are on different dedicated servers) you are mimicking some of the features of a CDN. Namely, spreading the load so no one server gets hit too hard. A true CDN, like you said does far, far more and does it more efficiently.

And a CDN still wouldn't improve SEO, with the exception of if your server is just getting killed by traffic and can't deliver pages. If that's the case you have much, much larger problems than worrying about SEO schtuff. Neither will off loading css to a different domain, hostname or subdomain.

I'm with you here, it isn't going to help SEO, it's all about performance.

Personally, unless you know you have a reason to do more, I'd just recommend severing your static content from one separate subdomain to take advantage of parallelization, but its probably not worth spending to much time on (its not hard to do, though).

[Live links removed again. Please review the [url=http://www.highrankings.com/forum/index.php?act=boardrules]Forum Rules[/url].]

Edited by Randy, 19 May 2008 - 09:22 PM.

[don h]

If I had a website that overwhelmed a single dedicated server I wouldn't use additional domains to host specific files to balance the load.

I'd use round robin DNS, rsync to keep the website files synchronized, and MySQL is capable of synchronizing the database with the other MySQL databases hosted on the other servers.

And If I was getting that much traffic I probably wouldn't be concerned with SEO.

[Randy]

I'm with you Don.

[Jill]

presumably helping Google digest it a bit better and give the remaining code a bit of a boost in terms of density.

Google absolutely doesn't need that kind of help. They don't have any problems whatsoever with lots of code. Removing it doesn't help them or make a difference to your indexing.