CloudFlare and SEO problems

by 10 replies
13
Back on January 8th I decided to move my site over to a free CloudFlare account to see how it would affect my speeds. It improved my google insights speed scores as expected so I was happy with that.

Well, after a couple weeks I've noticed that my site has dropped from the 24th spot in google ranks all the way down to 268 for my main keyword. Long tails are holding their spots it seems

Is this dramatic drop due to CloudFlare, or do I have other problems? I read on other site that Cloudflare has many spam sites hosted on it and google is penalizing legit sites on their IP's. Is this true?
#search engine optimization #cloudflare #problems #seo
  • Can't say it's Cloudflare. Because I have around 19 sites with Cloudflare and all of them went higher rankings.
    • [1] reply
    • Are you using their free service or paid?

      I have removed the site from cloudflare and we'll see if it bounces back. May just be a coincidence.
  • so I removed my site from CloudFlare last Wednesday (21st), as of today my rankings have bounced back for my main keyword, actually a little better. So was it CloudFlare or just a fluke coincidence, who knows.
    • [1] reply
    • We actually shouldn't affect your SEO at all (search engines have special rules in place for sites using CDNs). Did you have any crawl errors in Google Webmaster Tools or any other warnings?
    • [DELETED]
  • Just a guess, but it's possible that it may of been just a temporary drop in the rankings due to the way your site is getting accessed.

    Similar to how a major site layout change could temporarily affect rankings. Or even when your site goes offline, it can lose rankings, but then shortly rebound. Are you sure you let enough time pass to be sure?
  • CloudFlare provides performance and security for any website, but various people feel the same that cloudflare is hurting SEO. Crawlers are programmed to back off in these instances That can quickly hurt rankings.
    Frequent change in DNS also affects SEO, and that is the main reson behind this. But CF not submits IPs to Google.
    • [1] reply
    • Google (and other search engines) have special rules in place for CDNs like CloudFlare. CloudFlare really shouldn't impact SEO negatively at all, nor should using any other service providing a CDN. If a user is having issues with SEO, then the first thing I would ask the user to do is check to make sure there aren't any warnings appearing in Google Webmaster Tools.
  • Of course, you think Google don't know that CloudFlare is a fake architecture to try and 'game' the rankings. You think that most sites using it are not small no-name businesses and you just ranked yourself with them. You think Google are not one of the most valuable companies in the world and that they don't know everything about everything given the amount of analytics they have access to.
    • [1] reply
    • "You think that most sites using it are not small no-name businesses and you just ranked yourself with them"

      Wrong. We have a ton of major sites using CloudFlare that you may have heard of, including Reddit, 4chan, etc. We have well over a million websites of all sizes running through our network & we aren't just used by little sites. If you are insinuating that you could have issues because of shared IP addresses, Google has addressed this issue in the past (not often a factor in SEO & rarely used for ranking).
  • As you solve your own problem, and yes it is true that cloudfare reduces seo in very little cases where is a network glitch on clould vm's for some longer time, but overall CDN services do not impact your seo at all, unless you get some error in y9ur webmaster tool
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    CloudFlare and SEO problems

    Back on January 8th I decided to move my site over to a free CloudFlare account to see how it would affect my speeds. It improved my google insights speed scores as expected so I was happy with that. Well, after a couple weeks I've noticed that my site has dropped from the 24th spot in google ranks all the way down to 268 for my main keyword. Long tails are holding their spots it seems