Ask HN: Is CloudFlare hurting my SEO?

A while back I decided to use the services of CloudFlare for a website as it promises a lot of advantages.

Google Ranking for the site was pretty good at that time.

For moving on CloudFlare I need to change the DNS to point to CloudFlare.

After somedays Google Ranking for the website started to go down.

Few days later I decided to go away with CloudFlare, as it did not make much of a difference in page speed, but it was for sure keeping away some Threats.

After getting away with CloudFlare, google ranking was getting better.

So do CloudFlare affect Google Ranking?? For my case it seems to me that way.

Thanks,...

Hi Igal,

went through your blog post, thanks for the info,

can you guess what could be the reason behind my scenario, does frequent change in DNS also affects SEO??

and does CloudFlare have their IPs manually whitelisted in all popular search engines (like Incapsula or Akamai, as per your post) ??

Here are some blog posts we wrote about CloudFlare's effects on SEO:

http://blog.cloudflare.com/?search=seo&sort=

Executive summary: while you should pick your vendor closely, we've worked with the major search engines to ensure that there will be no negative effect on your SEO rank. And, because search engines take speed into account with their rankings, most people see a moderate bump.

One post we haven't ever written, but we should at some point, is the effect of our Always Online feature on SEO. One of the worst things that can happen to a site for SEO purposes is to have a search engine's crawler come and the server to be down. Crawlers are programmed to back off in these instances (lest they exacerbate to a struggling server's problems). That can quickly hurt rankings. Always Online, as well as the overall resiliency that CloudFlare provides, can help ensure that when a crawler comes to index your site its content will always be available.

There's a bit about this in the following blog post:

http://blog.cloudflare.com/an-american-story-surviving-the-c...

But we should write more on it because it's probably more meaningful in terms of rankings for most sites than the speed boost we provide (since speed is a relatively small signal for ranking purposes).

Hi

Just saw your relpy.

To answer your question: Yes, I think that CF also submits IPs to Google No, frequent DNS change (if not accompanied by the loss of content) should not affect SEO.

Can you tell me more about your situation? I`m not sure at all its CDN related but maybe it got something to do with Google crawl? (there is a phenomena of "Google dance" that effects new domains and also ranking may change during SERP updates...)

There are more than 200 SEO factors, it can be any one of them (or any number of them). To help out I`ll need more info.