Comments on: Load Balancing – SEO

By: Nick

Nick — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 13:24:00 +0000

That seems like a poor man’s load balancing solution to me. Load balance the backend, not the frontend, it shouldn’t be visible to end users or search engines.

By: Building Your Site For International Traffic | Smash Robot

Building Your Site For International Traffic | Smash Robot — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 18:10:13 +0000

[...] of the site itself, your resources and how much you’re prepared to pay, how your CMS works, whether you use load balancing, how you need to manage your files and things like that. But if you’re designing a new site, [...]

By: Andy

Andy — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 10:13:28 +0000

Hi Cory,

The issue we had was actually getting to speak to someone in Akamai, as the IT department/developers held that relationship.

If the plunge is about to be taken, have a word with the Akamai techs BEFORE it happens… see if you can be guaranteed certain clusters of IPs… or certain blocks within the same geolocation. Unfortunately, Akamai’s load balancing is designed to do exactly that, balance load across servers depending on latency, traffic levels, outages, etc… so to limit which of their servers will host your sites, limits the load balancing effectiveness.

Keep me posted on how you get on!!

By: Andy

Andy — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 10:13:00 +0000

Hi Cory,

The issue we had was actually getting to speak to someone in Akamai, as the IT department/developers held that relationship.

Keep me posted on how you get on!!

By: Cory

Cory — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 13:59:36 +0000

I’m going to be dealing with this question in about…2 hours (ha!) with a client. They have two international sites hosted in their respective countries and are asking about taking the plunge into Akamai. Any updates on what happened with this situation?

By: Cory

Cory — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 13:59:00 +0000

By: Building Your Site For International Traffic | Shark SEO

Building Your Site For International Traffic | Shark SEO — Thu, 28 May 2009 08:05:13 +0000

By: FrintonBoy

FrintonBoy — Tue, 12 May 2009 09:35:55 +0000

What you could also do (depending on what is doing the directing to the Akamai network), is to make exceptions for those connections identified as being search engine robots.

This could be simply based on source IP, or using a more sophisticated behaviour based identification.

By: FrintonBoy

FrintonBoy — Tue, 12 May 2009 09:35:00 +0000

What you could also do (depending on what is doing the directing to the Akamai network), is to make exceptions for those connections identified as being search engine robots.

This could be simply based on source IP, or using a more sophisticated behaviour based identification.

By: FrintonBoy

FrintonBoy — Mon, 11 May 2009 15:32:45 +0000

Ahh, so the problem is, Akamai is doing what it’s designed for!

I guess the first question is, why are the client using Akamai in the first place? The service is designed with two (major) things in mind;

1. move content closer to the client to improve performance.
2. maintain the availabilty of the content.

Performance issues can be handled in different ways. How much traffic is the site handling to warrent the use of a CDN? It may be possible accelerate the performance within the origin location, negating the requirements for the CDN. You could also add intelligence to handle the peak traffic (possibly bursting out to the CDN or even a cloud based overflow area), minimising the effects cause by Akamai.

Resiliance (and performance) can be addressed in a number of ways, a second (active) origin location either in a physical datacenter, hosted environment or cloud service.

Obviously without knowing all the reasons Akamai were chosen makes this pure guess work, but hopefully my comments give you a starting point to work from.

Nick