How Cloudflare Signed Exchanges (SXG) Benefit SEO and Improve Load Time
A single click will allow Cloudflare customers to generate signed exchanges (SXG) for Google search. Signed Exchanges is an open web platform specification for verifying a cached version of a website.
Google developed the specification for the purpose of allowing faster delivery from a third party website. So what is the advantage of signed exchanges for website owners?
The answer is faster loading time and a boost in SEO, as loading time is an important criterion when displaying a website in search engine results.
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Understanding Caching
Caching is the process of storing multiple copies of files or data in a temporary storage location for faster access later.
The file or data is temporarily saved for web browsers, servers and software, so that the user does not have to download the information each time they access an application or a website.
DNS servers cache DNS records, CDN servers cache content, and web browsers cache Javascript, HTML files, and images. By caching, web browsers reduce page load time, since most of the content that appears on the page is saved on the device's hard drive.
These files are stored until their Time to Live (TTL) expires or the hard drive cache is full.
Understanding Signed Exchange (SXG) and How It Works
A signed exchange (SXG) is an open standard delivery mechanism for authenticating the origin of a resource regardless of how it was delivered.
This helps improve a variety of use cases, such as the offline Internet experience, pre-search, and service from third-party caches safely.
When search engine robots crawl your website for newly published content, you choose to deliver from a signed exchange rather than deliver the raw content.
This improves load time and gives your site an SEO edge. Let's see how Cloudflare generates Signed Exchange.
Step 1
Cloudflare fetches the original content, including response headers, that the website owner wants to sign.
Step 2
A header is added that uses Merkle's integrity content encoding for faster and better detection of data modification and corruption.
Step 3
Headers that don't make sense in the context of signed exchanges are also removed. Security-sensitive headers, such as set-cookie and authentication-info, are also crossed out.
Step 4
The original content with headings, signature, and backing URL is packaged in final binary for delivery.
A signed exchange is cached and sent to the crawler that stores it. When content is indexed, it appears in searches. The search engine keeps the signed exchange already loaded in the background to profile the cache in the client's browser.
As the exchange was delivered from a search engine, no signal will be sent to the point of origin, so the intention of the user / seeker is not known by other sources.
As the exchange is validated against your certificate, the browser will trust that the content will display it in attribution with the original URL. When the user clicks the link, the content will be linked immediately from the local cache.
Managing the signing process is quite complex, as many details are part of it, including:
CanSignHttpExchanges extension to certificate
Delivery of certificates in specific CBOR format
OCSP stapling to ensure validity of certificates
Automatic renewal of certificates at frequent intervals
Caching generated signed exchanges
All of these are present in the Cloudflare warehouse. Through its partnership with Google, Cloudflare has ensured that technology is easily integrated, with the push of a button.
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