Cloudflare's Effect on SEO

[Pjman]

The malicious world finally caught up to me. I have a server that an organized Distributed Brute Force Attack has been targeting since Thanksgiving. It is so large (16,000 requests per second) that it basically makes the entire server inoperable. My host tried everything over the last few weeks and it is just relentless. I finally broke down and installed Cloudflare to shield it. Worked like a charm!

I have been putting off going all in on Cloudflare for two reasons:

1. Nothing in this world is free. I don't understand their angle.

2. When you enable them you can accidentally have the same IP as a bad actor (on cloudflare) and have major affects on your SEO.

Am I just paranoid here about the SEO affects?

[StupidIntelligent]

Many top sites on the internet use CF.

[tangor]

Bad Actors v Third Party ... gotta weigh the pros and cons and go from there.

[EditorialGuy]

Nothing in this world is free. I don't understand their angle.

It's probably about capturing a dominant market share so that investors are willing to throw money at them.

Also, don't forget that plenty of Web publishers are paying for higher levels of CloudFlare service (Pro Plan, Business Plan, and Enterprise Plan). It's not like CloudFlare is giving away the store.

[NickMNS]

I don't understand their angle.

I have been using the free tier for years on multiple websites. There are no gimmicks, no pressure, no annoying email offers. Their angle, is that they offer some very compelling services that one needs to pay for such as rate limiting and service workers. Given my current traffic levels I haven't had a justification to use these services, but I certainly see their value.

[Shaddows]

Just a classic Freemium model.

And it works. We started free, and are now a paying customer. No pressure, just an attractive suite of utilties that we felt were worth paying for.

[SweetPotato]

I don't think it has any effect on SEO.
People might say it helps but never noticed any evidence.
Your site ip Will be different for every visitor. They will see the ip of the cloudflare mode they are connected to.
I don't think anybody considers cloudflare IP's as bad actors. If they do it would affect thousands of legitimate sites. It's a bad approach.

[brotherhood of LAN]

Possibly crawl rate may be affected, maybe not. Haven't saw any empirical evidence of it and I'm sure Google's quite aware that ~7million domains are within that network.

[Pjman]

Thanks for the feedback guys. After doing some deep research, it looks like Google is highly in tune with what Cloudflare is doing and they have partnered to low the chance of false positives on IPs. Which makes me feel a lot better that my rankings won't tank.

I know the Brute Force attack that was the bane of existence, is in the read mirror and my site is super fast loading now. Next on to look at their business plan.

[aristotle]

Nothing in this world is free. I don't understand their angle.

Is it possible that CloudFlare gets a small payment from the hosting companies whose servers contain the original files that it uploads?

I looked at CloudFlare a few years ago as a possible easy way to convert my sites to https, but decided against it at that time, mainly because I was suspicious of the "free" plan. But maybe I should look at it again.

[tangor]

I was suspicious of the "free" plan

Right to be that way. "Free" actually means "until we corner the market then you will PAY and PAY and PAY."

MEANWHILE, there are good reasons to consider cloudflare if your site is subject to malicious attacks.

[Pjman]

Yeah, CF has been a really good experience for me so far. Bot activity went to zero, the site is rocking fast at least 30% faster. I'm sure my speeds in foreign countries really jumped too.

The only drawback so far has been that my analytics data (as far as triggered goals). They aren't the most accurate anymore. Some goals are never triggered, happens infrequently, but noticeably.

[Pjman]

Just wanted to follow this up after implementing Cloudflare on 3 sites. For 2 of the sites, it has do nothing but improve speed reliability and block malicious traffic. SE ranking on those sites improved too.

For one of my ad-heavy sites it really hurt rankings. The site is 2 years old and has grown by at least 10% every month. Almost to the day I implemented it, rankings have steadily declined. In 45 days since implementing it I have seen a 30% decline in SE traffic. I tested everything about it.

It looks like for that particular site, Cloudflare slows it down by about 25% compared to just running off of the VPS. It is a completely static site, but the target market is US and its on a super fast VPS in the middle of the country. I removed Cloudflare for that site 2 weeks ago and the SE traffic has grown since.

Just wanted to share, in case anyone runs into this.

[aristotle]

But hasn't google said in the past that the site has to be excessively slow for a speed demotion to occur?

[Dimitri]

I am old school, so personalty, I prefer one (or more) dedicated servers at host with a good anti-DDos. Like that I feel (may be mistakenly) that I have a better control of what is going on.

CF is great, but you rely on them, and loose part of the control. If CF has hiccups , your sites too, if CF has a bug, your sites too, etc... Also, keep in mind that things are not necessarily free forever, I am not saying that CF will remove its free offers, but you never know. One day, CF (or a new owner) might be greedy, and starts tightening the free offers. Remember what happened with Google maps for example.

[Pjman]

@aristotle

I'd say G is comparing our sites to others on the same term. A 25% speed reduction is making my site slightly faster than all others in my niche. Without that boost, I'm 3-4 seconds slower than everyone else. In my case, I feel it made a difference.

I thought it would be bad neighbors on the CF IP, but I checked all of them and nothing is remotely spamish.