I had a thought about CDNs and if they affect page rankings. Lets say hypothetically if I was to create a CDN as a subfolder in my site. This folder would contain a resource that is useful e.g. Javascript library. This resource I would then share with other sites who would include my CDN resource into their pages.
Would this improve my rankings in Google etc. as their analytics will detect the resource link to my own website and then index it or record it somewhere?
No, this will not improve your ranking. Links from other websites, specifically websites with related content that rank well for the same things you hope to rank well for, help you rank better. Sharing a resource does not with SEO nor is Google Analytics used towards this purpose. Now if you provide a useful tool other websites may link to you because of it but that would be an indirect benefit of it and your primary goal as asked in your question definitely will not work.
Have to disagree with John based upon the literal elements involved in CDN. Obviously if a page loads faster it will be treated better by search engines.
<a/>) links, not <link/> or <script/> links. And while performance problems will undoubtedly negatively affect search ranking, there's no evidence to suggest that marginal above-average performance increases will improve PR.
– Lèse majesté
Feb 28 '12 at 2:48
<a> tag links which have much more weight when it comes to your ranking position than your pages load time. Here is an article about GoDaddy using their seal on hosted pages to increase their rankings, in this case they use thousands of <a> tags to rank yoast.com/godaddy-link-building
– Anagio
Feb 28 '12 at 8:04
A CDN can be very helpful in getting your pages to rank better by improving their loading speed. Pages that take longer that three seconds to load (including all of their images, scripts, and CSS) fall in the rankings because users tend to click back to something else on Google before they are done loading.
A CDN can speed up the loading of the images scripts and CSS and may get you under the 3 second threshold.
For image SEO purposes, you should create the CDN as a sub-domain of your website. For example if your website is www.example.com, then your image CDN might be images.example.com. images.example.com can be a cname to your CDN provider. Getting images to rank it Google image search when they are on a different domain than your own is much harder.
