Cloudflare has an impact on SEO?

[aidenhera]

i have same speed on CF from my country which is about 600 milliseconds for full page load (rich content page btw)

india guy with no CF on would probably takelonger to load my europe hosted website


but with CF i assume his speed is just like in my case, about 600milliseconds because cloudflare most likely has server or two in india

 

[S godlewski]

i have same speed on CF from my country which is about 600 milliseconds for full page load (rich content page btw)

india guy with no CF on would probably takelonger to load my europe hosted website


but with CF i assume his speed is just like in my case, about 600milliseconds because cloudflare most likely has server or two in india

Did you test that? Are you warming up your cache on all servers? Is the expire set really far out for everything? If you only get a few hits from India a day but hundreds locally the cache on the India server could be stale and that user is grabbing fresh content because the TTL expired on his requests. Does it make sense to warm up your cache? You have to test especially if you are on the free plan and have no idea how CF is set up to distribute your content to all their servers. If you have a busy site I would agree with you but still test to make sure that is actually happening.

 

[hakcz]

Just to clarify: no one is saying CF is evil and is always bad.

There are a few of us here saying maybe testing a few under-performing websites with CF free removed is a test worth doing given there is little to lose.

I've always had my doubts about CF free because I've not seen a single instance where CF free has improved speed to any noticeable effect (the security-side was always my main reason for using it) but moving to non-shit web hosting did have an effect.

Now, if I find that zero sites were affected by the change then so be it. If I find two sites were affected by the change and no one here believes me...I don't give a shit. I would have tested it for myself and other people can test for theirselves.

Nice explanation man. Those saying that I am wrong and they are right but they didn't test it yet is BS. What matters for me is the result. Good result for is money and not using CF is giving me good result in seo ranking.

 

[AngoraSpace]

Hi OP,
Since your threads a did a TONS a research and i find some really awesome informations :

Here is the long story short :
- Cloudflare USUALLY don't drop your ranking HOWEVER
- Cloudflare can drop your ranking really really hard if it's paired with a really poor domain on the same IP and same SSL certificate (there is usually 10 - 15 domain / IP)
- If this happend to you, there is only two thing you can do
1 - Remove Cloudflare, if it's cloudflare you will recover fast)
2 - Buy "Business plan" then upload a custom SSL certificate, it will put you on a dedicated IP Address (according to Cloudflare -> "To reduce the number of Cloudflare IPs that your domain shares with other Cloudflare customer domains, upgrade to a Business or Enterprise plan and upload a Custom SSL certificate.")

Here is some case study of cloudflare BAD impact on SEO
- https://serverguy.com/case-study/cloudflare-seo/
- https://salt.agency/blog/seo-rankings-cloudflare/
- https://www.reddit.com/r/bigseo/comments/3htcot/cloudflare_rankings_destroyed_in_36_hours/

I hope it can help you buddy !

How do we know if our neighbors (on the same ip and ssl) are good or bad?

 

[AngoraSpace]

i have same speed on CF from my country which is about 600 milliseconds for full page load (rich content page btw)

india guy with no CF on would probably takelonger to load my europe hosted website


but with CF i assume his speed is just like in my case, about 600milliseconds because cloudflare most likely has server or two in india

Cloudflare is proxy CDN with multiple pop that provides you multiple mirror of your website around the world. So, when visitors access your website from another country, then Cloudflare will provide the nearest mirror to that visitors country, not to your long road original server. But if the visitors access your website from near of your original server, then it's not big difference load time.

 

[elladani]

How do we know if our neighbors (on the same ip and ssl) are good or bad?

Go here : https://viewdns.info/reverseip/

Check the domains of the same ip (if it's scam / warez / porn without about page etc...) and you will guess by yourself

 

[AngoraSpace]

Go here : https://viewdns.info/reverseip/

Check the domains of the same ip (if it's scam / warez / porn without about page etc...) and you will guess by yourself

Thanks for explanation.

 

[atomicpete]

Go here : https://viewdns.info/reverseip/

Check the domains of the same ip (if it's scam / warez / porn without about page etc...) and you will guess by yourself

And what if you want to rank for a porn site? Does it hurt when your neighbors have a pet webshop?

 

[WannaBeIzaya]

Those who want to test this out first need to check if they have bad neighbors. To do that, enter your root domain (example.com) on https://viewdns.info/reverseip/ and see how many domains are listed there. In my case, I saw several porn and pharma sites on the list along with my domain.

Now the next step for me was to disable Cloudflare's HTTP Proxy (CDN) which you can do by toggling off the in the CF dashboard. In this way, you will be using Cloudflare only as DNS manager.

If you have illegal streaming sites then you better not disable CF proxy, as it will reveal you server IP making it easy for law enforcement to catch you.

 

[Hoco]

Funny that I have just found this post. I stopped Cloudflare whilst switching servers (faster) and then Cloudflare had all the problems recently (had it disabled for over a week or so). I saw one of my keywords jump from not ranked to 11th for a high competition KW. I switched it back on and it dropped out of search 2 days later...

Might test it again, because I was completely baffled how it happened.

Any update on this? Did you test it again?

I've only just paused it today, so will check back next week. Not holding my breath, but would be interesting if I can pull it off because it has over 30k searches .

To those that have seen a positive effect after "pausing" Cloudflar eon your website:

Did you simply Pause it within CF or did you completely switch the nameservers away from CF?

I'm willing to test this on a few CF sites.

looking forward to the results!

Normally CF will NOT increase speed. If you got a fast server then it'll be much much faster than CF.

When you connect to a site behind CF, this happens:

you --> CF --> origin server

There are 2 network requests happening here.

In some sites I manage the CF to origin server connection took tens of milliseconds. The time to first byte shot up significantly in the speed test.

You may cache your site but cache doesn't work for dynamic sites which update frequently. If users log in and do stuff, there won't ever be any cache benefit.

CF is not meant for speed, it's meant for security. It can block hundreds of common attacks and ddos.

I have paused it as that is what I had done originally, but I did switch servers including the name servers at the same time - it was during that period I saw the increase.

I'm testing it with a paused service, so will look out for your comments on switching the name servers.

To be honest, I'm not expecting a similar reaction, but doesn't hurt to test.

Cloudflare will cache most of static contents such as htmls, javascripts and images on their multiple severs around the world. This will reduce the loads on your website and those contents load faster for every one as cloudflare is a CDN.

For dynamic contents the delay between your server to cloudflare is minimal as cloudflare have servers in almost every country so I dont think this small lag will do any significant effect on your SERP.

I still see no reason to abandon cloudflare, I really dont believe these reports of "after I stop cloudflare my ranking improved", I cant trust their tests
cloudflare is providing so many good free services. The wildcard free SSL on your domain, Many different method of reducing the size of page and delivering them to visitors faster, a cache system that enable us to specify what contents and what length to be cache on browsers or cloudflare servers....

Many people here talk about the good sides from cloudflare like speed etc.

But the main reason why the rankings drop are the nameservers, IPs and SSL certificates, which you share with "bad" sites, i guess.

I also have a lot of sites on cloudflare for years now.. But I will definetely test it out withoud cloudflare!

Cheers.

Keep us updated with your changes.
Originally, I think we share IP and SSL cert with thousands of sites, penalizing all of them because of some bad sites doesn't make sense to me.
But after reading through this thread, I'm having second thoughts.
I'l just wait for reports from other members as I'm doing fine, don't want to risk changing anything.

Cloudflare does not affect ,it helps reduce the loading time for a website and also helps in security for the site also.

For those that are interested, I paused my Cloudflare CDN service last week to test this theory out.

I should let you know I am by NO MEANS an EXPERT - I am just testing things, and following reasonable causes outlined in this thread & via Google searches. So please be kind with your thoughts and suggestions about the experiment .

For the sake of testing, I have done absolutely zero work to the website - no articles, up updates, no nothing.

Here are the results - including the two spikes I received surrounding Cloudflare on Pause:

(Edit: Not too sure why the image isn't displaying, however I had two spikes in rankings between 30/06/2019-03/07/2019 and today (18/07/2019))
Results as of today:

As you can see, pausing the service regained my ranking in a keyword that is highly competitive as I mentioned before in an earlier post, and you can see the two spikes in rankings above.

Is this a coincidence? I don't believe so.

Many people here talk about the good sides from cloudflare like speed etc.

But the main reason why the rankings drop are the nameservers, IPs and SSL certificates, which you share with "bad" sites, i guess.

I also have a lot of sites on cloudflare for years now.. But I will definetely test it out withoud cloudflare!

Cheers.

The nameservers and IPs were not an issue for me (I checked pre-experiment and during), so it could be the SSL based on your statement?

As of now, I am using everything from my own host, including SSL... Might need to test that. I have just confirmed that I am using the SSL from my host and not Cloudflare's.

Conclusion:

As per experiment, rankings did improve after pausing Cloudflare's whole services. However, there are hundreds of reasons why things like this can happen - what worked for me, may not work for you.

This could just be a temporary ranking change, but it is hard to believe that could be the case after pausing Cloudflare has seen rank performance increases twice (one by accident, the other by experiment) in the past month.

Today I posted the ranks re-gaining, I could easily just lose the ranks again whilst Cloudflare is turned off tomorrow, or in the next few days... So take this conclusion and experiment with a pinch of salt. However, it is hard to discount that by pausing Cloudflare saw improvements.

Cloudflare as a CDN is fantastic, so I'm a little disappointed really as my website is global and requires the data servers to increase speed to international visitors. So I will run the test without the SSL provided by Cloudflare. I will further post my findings.

Should the test fail, I have two further CDNs to fallback on in the near future.

Hope this helps.

All the best.

 

[Daisy Deals]

@doncanolli your dp just made my day

 

[thiassi]

For those that are interested, I paused my Cloudflare CDN service last week to test this theory out.

I should let you know I am by NO MEANS an EXPERT - I am just testing things, and following reasonable causes outlined in this thread & via Google searches. So please be kind with your thoughts and suggestions about the experiment .

For the sake of testing, I have done absolutely zero work to the website - no articles, up updates, no nothing.

Here are the results - including the two spikes I received surrounding Cloudflare on Pause:

(Edit: Not too sure why the image isn't displaying, however I had two spikes in rankings between 30/06/2019-03/07/2019 and today (18/07/2019))
Results as of today:

As you can see, pausing the service regained my ranking in a keyword that is highly competitive as I mentioned before in an earlier post, and you can see the two spikes in rankings above.

Is this a coincidence? I don't believe so.



The nameservers and IPs were not an issue for me (I checked pre-experiment and during), so it could be the SSL based on your statement?

As of now, I am using everything from my own host, including SSL... Might need to test that. I have just confirmed that I am using the SSL from my host and not Cloudflare's.

Conclusion:

As per experiment, rankings did improve after pausing Cloudflare's whole services. However, there are hundreds of reasons why things like this can happen - what worked for me, may not work for you.

This could just be a temporary ranking change, but it is hard to believe that could be the case after pausing Cloudflare has seen rank performance increases twice (one by accident, the other by experiment) in the past month.

Today I posted the ranks re-gaining, I could easily just lose the ranks again whilst Cloudflare is turned off tomorrow, or in the next few days... So take this conclusion and experiment with a pinch of salt. However, it is hard to discount that by pausing Cloudflare saw improvements.

Cloudflare as a CDN is fantastic, so I'm a little disappointed really as my website is global and requires the data servers to increase speed to international visitors. So I will run the test without the SSL provided by Cloudflare. I will further post my findings.

Should the test fail, I have two further CDNs to fallback on in the near future.

Hope this helps.

All the best.

Interestingly, I've seen some positive ranking spikes for a few money keywords on 2 of the 5 sites I've removed CF Free from.

Very difficult to conclude that CF is definitely the reason, however. I'm going to give it a couple of weeks to see what else happens before drawing any conclusions.

 

[Hoco]

Interestingly, I've seen some positive ranking spikes for a few money keywords on 2 of the 5 sites I've removed CF Free from.

Very difficult to conclude that CF is definitely the reason, however. I'm going to give it a couple of weeks to see what else happens before drawing any conclusions.

That's it though, the thing that intrigues me the most is the SSL - as that is the only variable I can think of as I find it hard to believe that the speed optimisation offered by Cloudflare would impact the rankings like that?

 

[S godlewski]

I also want to know if those ranking changes stick or drop back down to where they were. if one of you wants to pm me a url with a couple of keywords I would love to drop it into one of my keyword monitors to try and figure this out. If not no problem, since I get you don't know me and we are where we are.

 

[Deleted member 1286974]

Theoretically, a CDN won't ever hurt your SEO.

I've been using a CDN for years now (the free version of Cloudflare) and it's speeded up my site.

I've also never had any problems with my rankings. Indeed, I am ranking first for a lot of keywords.

 

[bartosimpsonio]

For those that are interested, I paused my Cloudflare CDN service last week to test this theory out.

I should let you know I am by NO MEANS an EXPERT - I am just testing things, and following reasonable causes outlined in this thread & via Google searches. So please be kind with your thoughts and suggestions about the experiment .

For the sake of testing, I have done absolutely zero work to the website - no articles, up updates, no nothing.

Here are the results - including the two spikes I received surrounding Cloudflare on Pause:

(Edit: Not too sure why the image isn't displaying, however I had two spikes in rankings between 30/06/2019-03/07/2019 and today (18/07/2019))
Results as of today:

As you can see, pausing the service regained my ranking in a keyword that is highly competitive as I mentioned before in an earlier post, and you can see the two spikes in rankings above.

Is this a coincidence? I don't believe so.



The nameservers and IPs were not an issue for me (I checked pre-experiment and during), so it could be the SSL based on your statement?

As of now, I am using everything from my own host, including SSL... Might need to test that. I have just confirmed that I am using the SSL from my host and not Cloudflare's.

Conclusion:

As per experiment, rankings did improve after pausing Cloudflare's whole services. However, there are hundreds of reasons why things like this can happen - what worked for me, may not work for you.

This could just be a temporary ranking change, but it is hard to believe that could be the case after pausing Cloudflare has seen rank performance increases twice (one by accident, the other by experiment) in the past month.

Today I posted the ranks re-gaining, I could easily just lose the ranks again whilst Cloudflare is turned off tomorrow, or in the next few days... So take this conclusion and experiment with a pinch of salt. However, it is hard to discount that by pausing Cloudflare saw improvements.

Cloudflare as a CDN is fantastic, so I'm a little disappointed really as my website is global and requires the data servers to increase speed to international visitors. So I will run the test without the SSL provided by Cloudflare. I will further post my findings.

Should the test fail, I have two further CDNs to fallback on in the near future.

Hope this helps.

All the best.

Really interesting test there. Thanks for sharing this. Will carry out some tests based on this.

 

[Renfield-Files]

Set up your site with WP Rocket and get rid of CDN. If you reach 90/85 on gtmetrix you're Fine.

 

[Hoco]

Theoretically, a CDN won't ever hurt your SEO.

I've been using a CDN for years now (the free version of Cloudflare) and it's speeded up my site.

I've also never had any problems with my rankings. Indeed, I am ranking first for a lot of keywords.

Yes, it will speed up the website for sure - especially for international traffic. This is the key reason why I used the CDN for, but my quick findings showed that it did have an impact on my rankings - which is why I tested it. I never had problems ranking either, just after pausing the service it increased them. Like I mentioned in my post -- the conclusion should be taken with a pinch of salt because it was a test that lasted less than a week. Bear in mind, I never ranked for the keyword before until I paused CF twice this month.

Really interesting test there. Thanks for sharing this. Will carry out some tests based on this.

Thanks, like I mentioned results may vary - but at least we have managed to start pulling a thread on the subject matter.

Set up your site with WP Rocket and get rid of CDN. If you reach 90/85 on gtmetrix you're Fine.

Yes but WP Rocket does not act as a CDN. If you are targeting traffic across the world, your website could load much slower for that international person without a CDN. If you are only targeting the same country as you, say UK traffic to a UK host, then a CDN isn't much of an improvement. However, when it is UK to US - it significantly improves site speed.

 

[Deleted member 1286974]

Yes, it will speed up the website for sure - especially for international traffic. This is the key reason why I used the CDN for, but my quick findings showed that it did have an impact on my rankings - which is why I tested it. I never had problems ranking either, just after pausing the service it increased them. Like I mentioned in my post -- the conclusion should be taken with a pinch of salt because it was a test that lasted less than a week. Bear in mind, I never ranked for the keyword before until I paused CF twice this month.

You got me thinking of deactivating my CDN right now!

 

[Anna Barley]

I'm using Cloudflare DNS and SSL services After my site ranked on google.
https://www.cloudflare.com/dns/