SEO Werkt!

If you’re a big huge e-commerce business, your time is money. Literally. Amazon.com made $61 billion last year, which boils down to $167 million a day, $7 million an hour, and $116,000 a minute. Every minute counts, which is why you cant afford to have your website go down or be slow, even for just a little while.

That’s why Los Angeles-based content delivery startup EdgeCast launched a new product called EdgeCast Transact, provides a dedicated CDN built just for e-commerce companies, with all the features that e-commerce companies need. EdgeCast Transact is built on top of the company’s new Commerce Acceleration Network, which is built to be PCI-compliant and enable acceleration and optimization of e-commerce pages.

While a number of CDNs tout features that e-commerce websites crave, like application acceleration, page optimization, and small-object delivery, EdgeCast is the only one that has broken its e-commerce offering out and put it on its own dedicated network infrastructure. And the company has spent the last year designing and testing out this purpose-built network for e-commerce providers so that they don’t have to share any infrastructure with media companies or social networks or whatever.

That means that e-commerce companies won’t have to worry if there’s a DDOS attack against a media company, or a surge in traffic during the Super Bowl at a social networking site, or whatever. The network is also built to be fully redundant and have all sorts of failover and elastic provisioning to handle holiday traffic spikes and the like.

For clients, that’s like not just buying a Rolls Royce, but having your own private highway to drive it on. At least, that’s what EdgeCast president James Segil says.

Anyway, in addition to having their own private infrastructure, EdgeCast Transact is designed to provide secure sessions between the origin and end user. It also has mobile device detection and front-end optimization built in, to ensure the best performance regardless of the platform or device someone’s using to access the site.

E-commerce companies benefit from also having access to a dedicated customer support team and “white-glove service,” which Segil says is needed for most of those customers. It’s also going to be updated with the needs of business customers in mind — which means e-commerce business cycles, code freezes during the holidays and other busy shopping seasons.

EdgeCast continues to win business in the CDN market, with more than 6,000 customers. Those clients include some big names, like Twitter, Hulu, Pinterest, Etsy, and Tumblr. (Don’t worry, Yahoo is a client too.) The company now has about 215 employees, most of which are in the United States… Although it’s been expanding its footprint with sales and support internationally.

Who needs SQL? In fact, who needs databases?

Apparently no-one, including those who are building complex web applications. And new startup Orchestrate.io just took a massive $3 million seed round to prove it. Orchestrate takes the queries that developers would typically write in order to build an application, such as geolocation, time-series, social graph, full-text search, and more, and unifies everything a developer would need in a single API.

In other words, all the time and resources that would typically go towards designing your data solution can now be redirected to building your application.

“Complex apps require highly optimized queries, so much so that major companies such as Facebook and Google wrote custom big data databases like BigTable to manage them,” founder and CEO Antony Falco told me yesterday. “Typically you would devote 20-25 percent of your resources to data management, so there’s lots of savings. But when creating new apps, you can also reduce the time barrier to building services, getting multiple weeks of savings.”

Antony Falco, CEO and founder

One of those savings is found in that often companies have had to run or access multiple databases to enable their applications. All of them have to be monitored and maintained, scaled as your app grows, and distributed geographically and across multiple service providers to ensure high availability and low latency.

With Orchestrate, that’s all built in, Falco told me, including geographical distribution. He used to be a VP at Akamai, the content delivery network, so he knows a few things about scalability and access.

Talking about scalability, Orchestrate is looking to fill a pretty big niche:

The $3 million is for getting Orchestrate’s existing solution into production and hiring more engineers.

It’s a largish seed round — you typically see $750,000, $500,000, or less for seed rounds, but Falco, who acknowledged that it had some aspects of an A round, says that it will help the company expand farther. And, for a company with global aspirations, some expensive requirements are just table stakes.

“With $3 million we will be globally distributed,” he says.

Falco is a serial entrepreneur, also founding Basho Technologies, makers of the open-source distributed database, Riak. Orchestrate was founded just three months ago, in March 2013, and is based in Portland, Oregon.

The investment was led by True Ventures with Frontline Ventures and Resonant Venture Partners joining in.

photo credit: adesigna via photopin cc

Filed under: Big Data, Business, Cloud, Dev, Enterprise

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Most multinational sites will serve content via a Content Delivery Network (CDN). But not all CDNs are equal: what should you look for to get the best bang for your buck in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) across the globe? Since Google’s Caffeine update to its server infrastructure back in…



Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

A few months ago, Google launched a CDN like page speed service and we asked, would you give Google pagespeed a try…

A few months ago, Google launched a CDN like page speed service and we asked, would you give Google pagespeed a try?

47% of you said you would, whereas 30% said you wouldn’t and the rest were not sure.

There are many reasons why a webmaster and SEO would reply that they would or wouldn’t use the service. Some would love a method to speed up their pages and not have to worry about the technical – how tos. Some don’t trust Google to host their content and pages. Some think they can do it better than Google.

That being said, I am so curious if the 47% who said they would try it, if they actually tried it.

Take my new poll asking “Did you try Google Page Speed Service”?

Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld.

Note: This story was written earlier this week and scheduled to be published today.

Gary Illyes from Google responded to a question in the Google Webmaster Help forums about hosting your content on a CDN, content delivery network.

The question was why did Google assign a special crawl rate to his site…

Gary Illyes from Google responded to a question in the Google Webmaster Help forums about hosting your content on a CDN, content delivery network.

The question was why did Google assign a special crawl rate to his site.

Gary from Google said, Google may assign content hosted on a CDN with a special crawl rate. He specifically said you should most likely never increase the crawl rate manually if you are on a CDN, at best, leave it for Google to decide. You can lower the crawl rate, but do not increase it.

Gary from Google explained:

When you’re using a CDN, we may assign a special crawl rate for your site so that we can crawl as much as possible without affecting negatively others who’re using the same service. It’s best to not tackle that setting, especially since we’re already accessing your site more than 4000 times a day.

If you want to lower your crawling rate, let me know, but I definitely not recommend increasing it. I’d rather focus on posting unique and compelling content and on user experience.

More on CDNs and SEO:

• Amazon Elastic Load Balancing & SEO Considerations
• Does Google Index Content in “The Cloud” (Amazon S3, etc)
• More Tips From Google On Content On CDNs
• Google On Content Delivery Networks & Search Rankings
• Should You Host Images On Your Domain or Flickr For Best Traffic Potential?

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.