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Edge SEO and the (possible) future of democratised SEO (Part 2)
66 Plays1 year ago
This is part 2 of a discussion on Edge SEO with Chris Green. In this (final) part we discuss the security and sustainability implications of Edge SEO and explore what the future of Edge might be.
We very much recommend you listen to part 1 of this podcast episode before listing to this episode.
Visit Chris's website - https://www.chris-green.net/
Find Chris on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisgreenseo/
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Part Two of Edge SEO Series
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello, welcome back to the untitled SEO podcast. This is part two of a podcast that we started a few weeks ago on the subject of Edge SEO. And I have with me my honoured guest, Chris Green. Would you like to say hello, Chris? Hello, Chris.
Recap and What is Edge SEO?
00:00:15
Speaker
So if anyone hasn't listened to part one of this, I heartily recommend you go back and listen to part one first because we're not going to cover
00:00:23
Speaker
much of the same ground. We'll do a little kind of recap so as a part of that recap Chris could you just justify your existence please.
00:00:32
Speaker
Oh, wow. I wasn't expecting the existential question instantly. So I'll take it. I'll bring it back down to the edge question rather than the overall. But so, yeah, the kind of the cut and thrust of the edge SEO point is we are helping people fix their SEO problems in a different place. So we are focusing our fixes towards
00:00:55
Speaker
I guess the network edge, so on a CDN of the website rather than making changes on the website itself. And very quickly why you would want to do that, sometimes it's cheaper, a lot of the times it's quicker, and then in more and more cases, it's actually better, more performant to do so. So the nature of the SEO is pretty much the same as any kind of conventional SEO. We're fixing issues that Googlebot may have, whether they be technical or content-based, but it's the method of delivering.
00:01:25
Speaker
So a lot of the times these look more like software projects than core SEO elements, but they still have audits, they still have tracking, they still have stakeholder management, expectation management, just with a kind of cool engineering bit in the middle that kind of makes it all possible.
Advantages and Challenges of Edge SEO
00:01:42
Speaker
That is very nicely summarized. I've just realized in some ways it's a bit like when I worked in IT last century, everyone at the time was using what they call thin clients. You'd have one massive server sat in an office and it would serve the entire office block and people would only have what we call dumb terminals. And then we moved away to people having their own actual computers because it was much faster and many other advantages.
00:02:06
Speaker
So I've noted down, you just mentioned something, but I noted down advantages of using Edge SEO. So speed, as you just mentioned, ease of use for A-B testing, which is, I think for me, that's one of the most exciting things about the whole shebang. Quite mechanical things like redirect management and controversially bypassing developers to make small changes, which depending on the environment may or may not be a good thing. And depending on many factors,
00:02:35
Speaker
a developer I know talks about keeping the sharp knives drawer away from his clients. And I think that's something we can... Yeah, I don't disagree with that at all. I think there's some merit there. Excellent. So there's some other things that since we last spoke that it occurs to me might be advantages and I just want to run them by you.
Hreflang Complexities and Solutions
00:02:54
Speaker
So now I realize I've never said the next word I'm going to say out loud. I've read it many times. I've never said it out loud. Hurriflang.
00:03:06
Speaker
hreflang hreflang oh my goodness thank thanks for that it wasn't until i spoke to somebody at semrush that i learned how to say semrush yes and then they rebranded well it was a semrush for anyway yeah we won't get into that hreflang okay so go for it
00:03:24
Speaker
Well, so the hreflang is interesting and by interesting I mean more traumatic than it needs to be and seldom brings the benefit it should relative to the time it takes to get right. So we're starting on a good place. So the biggest issue of hreflang and getting that implemented correctly
00:03:46
Speaker
is more of a data problem. So you kind of need to be aware of how all of your different pages relate to all of your different regional and language variations. You need some kind of service or some kind of data source that understands all of these relationships. So you can then render that in code on each page. So you can indicate each version of the page and then reciprocate. So have the link coming back to kind of confirm to Google that that relationship's right.
00:04:15
Speaker
The big challenge for if you are implementing hreflang over lots of websites globally or even a handful, what you need to get that right is a single point of truth. So you understand that relationship.
00:04:30
Speaker
In theory, that shouldn't be too challenging. In practice, however, when you're looking at websites globally, you will have some that are on the most modern versions of a platform. You may have others that are five to 10 years, sometimes behind the curve, technology-wise. And that inconsistency between different regions, different countries, brands, however you want to frame it,
00:04:53
Speaker
that all causes times where hreflang would fall on its butt and stop working properly and and effectively google just ignores it at that point and they kind of concede yeah we get it it causes people a lot of problems but it's useful if you use it um edge the way that edge could fix it is
00:05:10
Speaker
would have to be more of, well, a couple of things. Firstly, you could inject hreflang into the head of the page. So you could put that markup into the metadata. You could use edge to generate an hreflang sitemap, for example, and host it on the edge. The challenge that you'd still need to overcome, you'd still need a service that was able to effectively crawl every page within the network that you want to kind of link by hreflang, and then
00:05:40
Speaker
build a service that kind of establishes all of the linkages between them and how to then render them on the respective sites. Now, that can be done on the edge. We've used the edge to generate just XML site maps. We've tapped into APIs from crawling software, say, content king. That part's doable. We are getting into the realms of
00:06:03
Speaker
An hreflang microservice like that built on the edge is a fairly big project. And this is me coming back to the start where I'm like, the effort to get hreflang right often is disappointing because what you get out of it doesn't feel representative of that effort. It's like that risk reward is not a great balance.
00:06:23
Speaker
So I would say if you're able to identify the elements on a page that would signify they're related, so say you've got product SKUs in the code and you could crawl all of the pages and you could map everything that shares the same SKU and then use that data, so store that data and then use that to render HVFLANG, that could all be seamless. But there are three or more steps in that process that would need to be established.
00:06:51
Speaker
Yes, it is doable. That's quite an elaborate way of sidestepping the main issue. I think it was John or someone similar on Twitter sort of pontificating a little about this. And I had to agree with him completely that the issue is almost more an organizational one. It's the decisions that have led to all of your data being so disconnected that you can't create valid hreflang.
00:07:17
Speaker
So if someone said, come to me and said, this is a massive problem for us, how do we fix it? I know how we'd architect a solution for that.
00:07:27
Speaker
Whether that's the best option is maybe another question. But equally, a lot of the times, I think we mentioned this before, Edge is just that other option. We're minimizing it or reducing the implementation gap. So if you're finding an internal team saying, no, I'm not going to write that microservice to try and pull all this together. We just don't have the time or the focus. OK, well, let us do it in a different environment.
00:07:50
Speaker
where we can be quicker, nimbler, not circumvent, but maybe tell them when we've done it and get someone senior to sign it off right at the end kind of initiative. So there's still a little bit of a risk. But yeah, that's one way that could do it. It's the thing that I always think about, and I don't very often vocalise this when we're in these projects, is I still have a feeling that Google may
00:08:12
Speaker
one day quietly retire hreflang for their support of it. I have a feeling, I think it causes everyone so much problems. I think we're kind of reliant on what actually could Google do it better without it. That's a big question. I mean, at the moment today, looking at what I see on a day to day basis, the answer is probably not, but I still think it could be retired. I think this could be another one of those projects that we have internal teams working on for
00:08:42
Speaker
obscene amounts of time that eventually, you know, on a minor scale thinking of like rel next prev when Google removed that support for that markup and then forgot to tell everyone. We could, I mean, we could get into that with hreflang. Although, is it yesterday or the day before they pointed everyone back to X default value as hreflang and said, this value is really important too. If you use that, it's better. So they're still trying. It's the constant battle.
00:09:11
Speaker
Yeah, okay, so so edge. Oh, yeah, you could in theory if you needed to, but it's not necessarily a reason to sort of move to that technology or just be an unfortunate intended unintended opportunity, an unintended opportunity, I think I'm going to call it. But this is a conversation I often have with clients and when I'm giving talks at things and I get questions afterwards is,
00:09:33
Speaker
trying to explain to people, Google do know. It's like people, it seems slightly old fashioned to me that people still kind of block WP admin in their robots with WordPress and like, look, Google sees a lot of WordPress sites, they know not to bother indexing that stuff. It's just a bit redundant.
00:09:52
Speaker
Okay, so outside of what Edge SEO can help deliver, I was wondering if there are security advantages.
CDN Security Benefits
00:10:02
Speaker
I'm guessing because the public is just one step further away from the source server, whether that might be an advantage from a security perspective. So I think a lot of the benefits of security are kind of
00:10:16
Speaker
inherited from the securities around a lot of CDNs.
00:10:25
Speaker
Depends how we kind of think about security as well really, whether we're looking at access to private data or like uptime and mitigating kind of malicious attacks and bits. I think in the latter camp, so Cloudflare initially came to most people's attention is that was the website that you would or the CDN you'd put your website through if you were getting attacked.
00:10:48
Speaker
and the Cloudflare network would effectively mitigate like DDoS attacks and similar. There's some really famous cases. I think they helped mitigate one of the biggest attacks on Spamhouse's website back in the day. So just the act of using a CDN just to kind of keep a website up when someone's trying to pull it down, that's
00:11:10
Speaker
really kind of important aspect of it and I do think actually a lot of brands sit behind CDNs for exactly that reason so most of those brands probably if you've got the right CDN provider will have edge functionality that they could utilize. As a sort of a proof of concept a couple of years ago, Simon, one of my colleagues
00:11:32
Speaker
it kind of built a proof of concept of like a website for voting that you effectively build on an edge server. So that again, you kind of, you don't have this like massive flood of people pulling down a server when they're trying to vote within the last 15 minutes. It's again, mitigated by a CDN. So I think the actual benefits for that are potentially huge. Although I do think the sophistication of bot attacks and botnets is far, far higher. So I think in other times like security and vectors for attack,
00:12:00
Speaker
The biggest failure for all of this is still like a login page in the squishy human that kind of enters their details to get into it. The problem exists between chair and keyboard. Yes, exactly. It is one of those. So, I mean, yeah, I think there is definitely some benefits. I think for just general kind of performance and uptime, CDNs are preferable.
00:12:20
Speaker
When I say that, there's always somebody in an organization that says, ah, but what about that time where Cloudflare was down for two hours or Fastly was down for two hours or whatever. And that's a big problem. If you're running all of your traffic through a CDN, an entire network goes down for whatever reason.
00:12:38
Speaker
you don't have anything you can do. And a lot of old school IT people get quite upset about that. And I can see why. We've started to see clients running what we call dual CDN strategies. So they would, for example, be on multiple. So you'd have one as a fallback, which from an edge SEO point of view is cool because some CDNs can do stuff better than others. But actually from an edge SEO perspective, that's tricky because if you've built a solution on one CDN, you need to build it on the other.
00:13:07
Speaker
if you want to keep this failover like fallback style thing. So it's not mainstream, but I think in the enterprise space, dual CDNing, so having, you know, for example, I might have everything served on Fastly and then I could have Cloudflare or an Akamai sat behind it ready to pick up or various, I mean, you'd have different reasons for configuring in different ways, but that's more just illustrative. So that's a good
00:13:35
Speaker
That's like the belt and braces security method. So you've got two like global enterprise level CDNs that are keeping your website up. And it's, but they've also will still have their own kind of load balancing and mitigation on their hosts and servers as well. So yeah, you can go proper to the nines on it. I would say most like 99.99% of websites will never need to go anywhere near that like
00:13:57
Speaker
Cloudflare is more than adequate for the vast majority of websites. If Cloudflare has a global network outage, lots of people do, and it's usually big news. So customers and various people are usually okay about that. I say okay, I don't like it, but I've seen people use that as an entire reason not to use a CDN, which is
00:14:16
Speaker
That's someone just looking for a reason not to do it. That sounds bizarre. I mean, one of the things that you and I have been around since the dark ages of the Internet in SEO, me only saying me more so than you, because anyone listening to this doesn't know that I'm quite a bit older than you. And sometimes in my more stressed moments, I think everyone's forgotten that the Internet didn't used to work.
00:14:41
Speaker
I like that. Even five or six years ago, you'd go, wow, this website's been up 98% of the time and that's fantastic. Anyway, that's just me being a grumpy old man. It occurs to me when some of the things we're talking about in the last episode, we're talking about how obviously speeding up a website is just good for everyone in Google.
00:15:02
Speaker
recognizes that entirely, but I thought that bearing in mind Edge SEO is partially a method of just delivering or Edge is a method of delivering assets to people much, much faster. There must be a sustainability
Sustainability in SEO
00:15:16
Speaker
advantage. Now, to explain this,
00:15:19
Speaker
out loud so that I understand it. Anyone who visits a website, their presence, their eyes on the website demands a lot of assets be moved from a server to their face, to their browser. So if you've got even quite a small website and you only got a few thousand visitors, those few thousand visitors will trigger hundreds of thousands of requests to a server. So if you've got a decentralized network like Edge,
00:15:46
Speaker
there must be a sustainability advantage there. It must require less power or there must be something positive there. What do you think of that?
00:15:56
Speaker
Yeah, so this is an issue or an area that I've thought about quite heavily. So I've done sort of carbon auditing and sustainability reporting for websites before as well. And CDNs always come up and that's inherently linked to Edge. So the parts that are clearly good, as you said, reducing journeys, reducing the amount of data that's transited, obviously reducing the amount of trips to the origin server,
00:16:20
Speaker
any incremental gains like that well the broadly they save people money and if you're saving people money in somewhere along the chain you're using less energy i'm painting broad strokes here but that often is the case and we also we know google is a huge fan of that because well like this whole shebang costs them vast amounts of energy and effort and resource too the the point the the butt or the fly in the ointment here i guess is it's more around with cdn's
00:16:48
Speaker
how they're powered and where they're based and that side of things. So the biggest carbon costs of a website usually is actually where they're hosted and the energy they're hosting is powered by. So you can shave off these. You can optimize images. Optimize images on the edge. You could be saving 60%, 70% on each image, which is quite a big saving over time.
00:17:16
Speaker
But if the data centers that house this data are powered by pretty carbon terrible sources, then it can kind of undo or outweigh any benefits or it has the potential to. And the challenge we have is it's incredibly hard for us to know
00:17:36
Speaker
how green these CDNs are, these data centers are. There's a lot of various points in this that we just don't understand it. And someone much smarter than me said that, well, imagine if you have the ability of like 100% uptime because of this magical network that's always on around the globe, does that sound like the most carbon efficient way to do it?
00:18:01
Speaker
And when you put it like that, it doesn't. But I also don't know if that in and of itself is a gross oversimplification. I know in this space, especially with the prices of energy and where it's raising, companies don't want to waste energy now. It's too expensive to. 10 years ago, it kind of was less of a thing. And I know that Google and a lot of other big tech are generally trying to reduce it. I mean, obviously, they're coming at it with the CSR angle that it's good and it's responsible to.
00:18:29
Speaker
I mean, the green is talking here as well. It costs. They're trying to reduce costs. So I think the premise that CDNs and edge-based stuff could save costs. Absolutely, it could. Whether or not it is today, that's challenging. It's hard for us to know. I do think, however, if you put your website on Cloudflare, you turn on the WebP image optimization, for example, and you reduce the amount of visits to your origin,
00:18:59
Speaker
You are probably doing something better than you were doing the week before so there is there is a small kind of incremental sustainability step but I've looked into this for some quite large companies and when you're talking about websites with when you get into the millions of pages point of view that the dynamic changes completely and Again hosting making sure you've got green energy keeping your lights on
00:19:23
Speaker
web-wise is probably the biggest step anyone could make. And moving to a CDN probably isn't doing that yet. Again, I need to be careful. I'm probably speaking with someone who doesn't know nearly enough about this as he probably should on the sustainability angle. So if you're a CDN or work on a CDN and you listen to this and you think, no, that's complete rubbish, please at me. Like I definitely... Tell me.
00:19:49
Speaker
We need to know. I think the positive thing here is that the folk like you and I are having this discussion. I think we haven't got the answer yet, but the fact that we are putting questions out there and are open to being educated by people who know more than we do, I think that's a significant step forward.
00:20:09
Speaker
as much as actually getting to the end result, whatever that might be. So I'll leave the answer to that hanging in the air for now then. There's maybe, but possibly. I mean, can you permit me a small tangent on this subject? So the problem that SEO has overall with sustainability and greenness is that
00:20:36
Speaker
The history of SEO is not in a place of doing the right thing and doing it really well and only doing what you need to succeed. Like the filling the web full of link farms and spam comments and scrapers and all of this other thing. Like from a sustainability point of view I think in
00:20:57
Speaker
the years to come I don't know how far 20, 30, 40 years we'll look back and that'll be like you know almost like the how we look back on coal fire power stations or combustion engines in that sense like there is so much wasted energy even rank tracking like something that every seo uses rank tracking is effectively a waste of energy especially anything beyond page two if you're searching all the way to page 100 I've there's a very very very tiny amount of real people ever make it that far into search results so
00:21:27
Speaker
And ignore that the 200 keywords, 500 keywords you may be tracking for your campaign. You just think of the millions and millions of keywords that are tracked by all SEOs and all tools globally. That's a lot of waste there, just in and of itself. That's ignoring, I still see these spam comment generators or forum posters and other things going around. All of this stuff, each individual interaction is a very, very small amount of energy.
00:21:56
Speaker
But when you kind of scale them up around the full point of it, that is costing. So I've started to think about web spam, Google's web spam team, more of actually having a moral imperative to make sure that stuff really doesn't work so we SEOs as a whole stop it, because it's fundamentally a waste that doesn't add value overall. Now, there's an important caveat to attach here is I need rank tracking to do my job. So I'm not going to turn off my rank tracker tomorrow. And I can understand how that might
00:22:24
Speaker
feel mildly hypocritical, and I feel that. But if we're talking about things that SEOs could do, build better websites, optimize your images, get people to where they need to go quicker. And if you can't produce the best content for something, consider whether you should rather than just putting a load of stuff there that's ineffectual and not going to do it. This is so on brand with the way I talk. I think SEO is only a way of amplifying a message that's already very good.
00:22:53
Speaker
So yeah, if you're not putting the best of something out there, then you're not helping. Yeah, I mean, you've got to be careful. I've worked in a lot of agencies, I've worked for a lot of companies, some businesses that do amazing things, others who don't do great things, and that's never sat well. And broadly, I don't spend a lot of time working with those because fundamentally the campaigns don't work as well.
00:23:19
Speaker
But, you know, I mean, I started my career writing spun content for directory pages before I really understood what they were like that super young. I think I come back and then started clearing them up in backlink removal efforts years later. So I, I kind of want to add value to the internet and make experiences better. And I think SEO is that an edge SEO is a big part of that to try and bring my tangent back in to land. But it's, um,
00:23:44
Speaker
Yeah, I think there's quite a complex dynamic here and I think that we aren't fully aware of all of this yet. I think the imperative that SEOs understand the cost and the implication of all of this data transferring, these magical bits of code that are fired out or these images that are loaded back or this data that you've scraped, I don't think enough people are close enough to it to understand, was it worth it? Is it useful? Does it actually make any difference or am I adding value?
00:24:13
Speaker
But that's a really quick way of getting yourself into an existential spiral. What am I actually doing? I think the fact that we're prepared to have discussions about these things just keeps it on the table, just keeps us aware and keeps everyone else aware.
00:24:31
Speaker
Interestingly, I had a conversation with somebody yesterday who I'm hoping to get on the podcast who has a beta product at the moment where it sounds to me like a single page application, but it served like 80, 90% through
Innovations and Challenges in SEO Adoption
00:24:48
Speaker
schema. And I don't fully understand it. I literally had a quick conversation and went, that sounds potentially really, really interesting because it
00:24:54
Speaker
it removes the tech debt to a massive extent. And then I thought, how the hell am I going to get that crawled? But I'm just chucking that in as just proof, really, that there's a lot of people out here looking for a new way to do things. I don't think anyone in our world, and I just mean the tech world, not just SEO,
00:25:14
Speaker
is going up, we've arrived at our destination, here we are. We've never thought that way at all, we never go, there you go, job done. We've completed the internet. The challenge there, we run up against this challenge on the Edge SEO side, is just because you might have generated the best technological response to a problem,
00:25:35
Speaker
But the adoption is really the key kind of point, really. So, for example, any benefits you could make on a platform like Wix or to an operating system, to a CMS like WordPress will have a far more profound impact and a higher chance of actually getting implemented. But as to those platforms have taken years and invested a lot of money into getting that way.
00:25:57
Speaker
I think there's a lot of really smart people that are producing some really amazing solutions to some of these web problems, but it's just getting coverage, getting people to adopt it. Speaking just entirely in the SEO community, it probably won't get adopted unless it has a noticeable impact on rankings or your bottom, like your costs.
00:26:17
Speaker
And if it doesn't, and if it's because it's just a better way of doing things or people should, that uptick will be really slow, sadly. And that's just basically because that's the economics of the industry. But that's, you know, you think about how do you incentivize someone to take Coreware vital seriously? Well, you spend a year and a half telling everyone it's a ranking factor. Yeah. And then slowly climb down. But that's, that's, that's, you know, Google have learned that, I mean, you know, they spent the last 15 years or so more longer, sort of,
00:26:46
Speaker
understanding what the language of the industry is and knowing how to kind of play. I think if a lot of these super smart people building better solutions that will make a better web are able to get adoption in those ways, that's challenging but that's ultimately what we should be looking at.
Future of SEO Specialization
00:27:03
Speaker
I mean like the edge debate, people still aren't on it because it's hard, it involves a skill set that's not on SEOs, it's a budget line that's probably not anywhere near you. It might be a better way of doing things but you need to upskill
00:27:14
Speaker
and learn about the platform, then you need to know how to make the business case, you need to go and take it to someone. But the more successes that we have and others have in this space, the easier it will be to build traction. It's just slow because new cool tech always is. We're still evolving. I wouldn't say we're in the wild west anymore, but we're not far off.
00:27:36
Speaker
So, you know, back, back when I started, you, you know, we, we were the people who built the website, you know, it's the proper kind of write the theme tune, sing the tunes that you build the website, you did the SEO for it, you did the graphic design for it, you did everything. And it's sort of people, it's become more and more specialized. I mean, I work with people who, you know, very specific tech SEO skills that are beyond me. And no matter how many times they very patiently try and explain what, what it is, I know the outcome and I know the gist, but I don't know that. And I think.
00:28:05
Speaker
I see edge facilitation as being one of the next natural niching parts of the SEO industry, because it's just too important not to do. It's too beneficial. And to a certain extent, if you've got really good client relationship, you say, look, this feels right. This feels good. So I think we ought to go in this. But I can certainly see that if you're working with corporates,
00:28:30
Speaker
And they want to present a report to the board that says we're going to spend this much money and this will be the outcome. The answer is always, it depends. It's the SEO cliche.
00:28:44
Speaker
Chris, I really enjoyed this conversation and I always like to end on an SEO cliche. I was going to ask you what your recommendations are for places to go to learn more about Edge SEO. I mean, there's malls and all the usual suspects have got some really good articles, but is there any particular place you think if someone's listening to this and gone, I need to get my head around this?
00:29:06
Speaker
What's a good starting point? Good point. So firstly, I'd say that the biggest barrier to entry is just getting onto a CDN and testing and playing around with it. So I would actually say go and set up a website through a free Cloudflare account. And assuming that you can repoint the name servers and handle that DNS kind of change, then you could be uploading redirects and hosting them on the edge
00:29:36
Speaker
within minutes is really that easy. You could do one click like optimization options really easily. And you are very low key and are doing edge SEO essentially. But you're also making your website probably quicker and some of the other benefits that we've discussed. Beyond that, the barrier to entry kind of or the hill that you need to climb steepens dramatically because you get into workers or computed edge. And I think broadly,
00:30:05
Speaker
most of that's written in JavaScript or similar kind of languages to that. I mean, they vary. So there is a bit of a coding kind of impetus there. I would say that both Cloudflare and Fastly have really good developer documentation to help you understand it and kind of with examples and templates. If you've never done any kind of coding or development, that's still going to be quite a steep kind of hill to climb there, in which case I would genuinely say go and do some like intros to
00:30:36
Speaker
JavaScript and start back. Now that feels a few steps removed, but I'm a strong advocate. I mean, I'm not an engineer. I'm not a developer. Ask me to write some halfway decent JavaScript. I would bumble through it and not be as quick as you might want. But when you're getting to the point of, you know, it will help you understand more about web tracking. It'll help you how to build workers. It will help you understand some of the deeper technical SEO elements. So I think that's a really worthwhile skill set to learn in general.
00:31:06
Speaker
and then go into their developer docs. I think in terms of just Edge SEO specifically, the industry is full of a lot of, here's what it is, here's what it could do. I know I may have written one or two, Simon has, Nick, who I work with has, so we've kind of helped fill the space for some of that. SEMrush has a few, there's a smashing of them, but all of it is talking about possibility. And I could kind of summarize a lot of that content for you. Imagine a call SEO thing,
00:31:34
Speaker
Okay. Find an engineer and find a client who has a CDN, one of the appropriate CDNs and between you, you will find a solution. So that age of writing the theme tune, singing the theme tune, that, that kind of, because the, the skill sets involved here are, I would say quite starkly different. And especially when you get into edge engineering is quite a special, very new and specialist area.
00:32:00
Speaker
your ability to do it all from day one, there won't be many people that can do that. I mean, I know that SEOs, there's quite a few sort of full stack devs, turned SEOs, they'll probably be okay. I'd say anyone who's just very specifically in SEOs, even if you're on the content side, you may struggle. But I still would strongly advocate, get on Cloudflare, test that, do that side at least, because if you're actually familiar with that process and you can kind of understand why that's beneficial,
00:32:29
Speaker
It unlocks the rest a lot quicker and then stay close to the docs documentation.
00:32:35
Speaker
Akamai recently released a few features that we previously were having to engineer. They're actually building it into their UI. So actually, you can just go and apply the changes through a nice, sanitized kind of environment. I think they're all going to start moving in that direction. So we will see that hill you need to climb to succeed and edge slowly reduce over time. I say slowly, because there are a lot of edge cases, no pun intended. But I hope they'll do it.
00:33:03
Speaker
Yeah, that Cloudflare image optimization, setups from redirects, you're starting on the edge and then turn to the docs from there. Brilliant stuff. Okay. Thanks very much, Chris. I'm going to say goodbye now. Would you like to say goodbye? Goodbye.