Cloudflare - Should I be concerned about false positives and bad neighbourhood IP problems
-
I am considering using cloudflare for a couple of my sites.
What is your experience?I researched a bit and there are 3 issues I am concerned about:
-
google may consider site bad neighbourhood in case other sites on same DNS/IP are spammy.
Any way to prevent this? Anybody had a problem? -
ddos attack on site on same DNS could affect our sites stability.
-
blocking false positives. Legitimate users may be forced to answer captchas etc. to be able to see the page. 1-2% of legit visitor were reported by other moz member to be identified as false positive.
Can I effectively prevent this by reducing cloudflare basic security level?
Also did you experience that cloudflare really helped with uptime of site? In our case whenever our server was down for seconds also cloudflare showed error page and sometimes cloudflare showed error page that they could not connect even when our server response time was just slow but pages on other domains were still loading fine.
-
-
Thanks Cyrus.
-
You may be interested in this post titled "Cloudflare and SEO" : https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-and-seo/
"We did a couple things. First, we invented a new technology that, when it detects a problem on a site, automatically changes the site's CloudFlare IP addresses to isolate it from other sites. (Think of it like quarantining a sick patient.) Second, we worked directly with the crawl teams at the big search engines to make them aware of how CloudFlare worked. All the search engines had special rules for CDNs like Akamai already in place. CloudFlare worked a bit differently, but fell into the same general category. With the cooperation of these search teams we were able to get CloudFlare's IP ranges are listed in a special category within search crawlers. Not only does this keep sites behind them from being clustered to a least performant denominator, or incorrectly geo-tagged based on the DNS resolution IP, it also allows the search engines to crawl at their maximum velocity since CloudFlare can handle the load without overburdening the origin."
-
Thanks Tom.
I will move now one of my main domains and will use their PRO plan. Noticed they have quite a number of settings to address the false positives. Our problem with cloudflare error pages may have been a temporary one while they where building the cache of the site. Anyway it is easy to enable/disable the cloudflare protection. So not much risk here. Could save us of a lot of potential headache in the future if it works as advertised. -
Hi,
-
I have used CloudFlare for a few sites and never had an issue with this. It is a risk/concern with all shared hosting, but CloudFlare are very proactive about addressing anything impacting their customers, so I would not have a concern on this side of things at all.
-
Again, I wouldn't have concerns here. CloudFlare are very adept at handling large-scale DDOS attacks . Having read some of their post-attack analysis reports, they usually mitigate any impact to customers very quickly. They have loads of customers, and if this sort of thing was an issue I think we'd hear about it fairly often.
-
I can't speak to the % of users that might get falsely identified as a risk and presented a CAPTCHA, but I'd be very surprised if it was as high as 1-2%; I've rarely seen that CAPTCHA screen myself. You should check what CloudFlare have to say on this issue, but I would have no concern here either.
I have never had an issue with CloudFlare impacting SEO performance or impacting the user experience. It has generally performed well for me, but the biggest issue I see with it is people hoping it is a 'cure all' and means they don't need to properly address issues affecting the performance of their site. If your database performance is very poor, meaning dynamic pages take a long time to load, then CloudFlare is not the answer (it may help - but you should address the underlying issue).
I am unsure about the issue with CloudFlare failing when your server is slow - I'd imagine CloudFlare support could help you with this - there may be a configuration option somewhere.
Overall - my suggestion would be that you go for it.
-
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
404 Errors flaring on nonexistent or unpublished pages – should we be concerned for SEO?
Hello! We keep getting "critical crawler" notifications on Moz because of firing 404 codes. We've checked each page and know that we are not linking to them anywhere on our site, they are not published and they are not indexed on Google. It's only happened since we migrated our blog to Hubspot so we think it has something to do with the test pages their developers had set up and that they are just lingering in our code somewhere. However, we are still concerned having these codes fire implies negative consequences for our SEO. Is this the case? Should we be concerned about these 404 codes despite the pages from those URLs not actually existing? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DebFF
Chloe0 -
Old product URLs still indexed and maybe causing problems?
Hi all, Need some expertise here: We recently (3 months ago) launched a newly updated site with the same domain. We also added an SSL and dropped the www (with proper redirects). We went from http://www.mysite.com to https://mysite.com. I joined the company about a week after launch of the new site. All pages I want indexed are indexed, on the sitemap and submitted (submitted in July but processes regularly). When I check site:mysite.com everything is there, but so are pages from the old site that are not on the sitemap. These do have 301 redirects. I am finding our non-product pages are ranking with no problem (including category pages) but our product pages are not, unless I type in the title almost exactly. We 301 redirected all old urls to new comparable product, or if the product is not available anymore to the home page. For better or worse, as it turns out and prior to my arrival, in building the new site the team copied much of the content (descriptions, reviews, etc) from the old site to create the new product pages. After some frustration and research I am finding the old pages are still indexed and possibly causing a duplicate content issue. Now, I gather there is supposedly no "penalty", per se, for duplicate content but a page or site will simply not show in the SERPs. Understandable and this seems to be the case. We also sell a lot of product wholesale and it turns out many dealers are using the same descriptions we have (and have had) on our site. Some are much larger than us so I'd expect to be pushed down a bit but we don't even show in the top 10 pages...for our own product. How long will it take for Google to drop the old and rank the new as unique? I have re-written some pages but much is technical specifications and tough to paraphrase or re-write. I know I could do this in Search Console but I don't have access to the old site any longer. Should I remove the 301s a few at a time and see if the old get dropped faster? Maybe just re-write ALL the content? Wait? As a site note, I'm also on a Drupal CMS with a Shopify ecommerce module so maybe the shop.mysite.com vs mysite.com is throwing it off with the products(?) - (again the Drupal non-product AND category pages rank fine). Thoughts on this would be much appreciated. Thx so much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mcampanaro0 -
Domain Change for a well positioned website... I'm a-scared
Hello, A few years ago I have "inherited" a website about a particular touristic area in Italy (the Langhe region) called langhe.net. The website is very well positioned, the domain has been registered in '97 and the overall SEO performance is pretty good (it ranks in the top #3 positions for all the main search queries in our niche). We are currently redesigning the whole thing, and one of the idea was to change the domain (and the name) of the website from langhe.net to lovelanghe.com (which we already registered). The reasons behind this decision are the following (most important first): Google prefer brands over keywords and "Langhe" is just a keyword LoveLanghe looks more memorable and "marketable" than just Langhe.net All our social presence is branded already as LoveLanghe (they were created years back under this name - I don't know why) We will do our due diligence work (301 everything, domain change in Search Console etc. etc.) but I'm still kind of worried that we will lose some ranking. So my question(s) are: do you think it's a good idea to change the domain when ranking is good and original domain is so old? how much ranking (approximately) are we going to lose? Thanks in advance 🙂 Best
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Enrico_Cassinelli0 -
Problems with US site being prioritized in Google UK
Our US version (.com) of our site is appearing above the UK version (co.uk) when using Google UK. I know Google has been giving US more priority in the UK market over the last couple years... What is protocol for fixing/dealing with this? Also, and probably more importantly, how do we handle users who are looking for the UK site right now? Majority of our users are coming from the US so we don't want to cause them any inconvenience, but the UK users need an easy way to get to the UK version quickly. Input is much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chrisvogel0 -
Is it a problem that Google's index shows paginated page urls, even with canonical tags in place?
Since Google shows more pages indexed than makes sense, I used Google's API and some other means to get everything Google has in its index for a site I'm working on. The results bring up a couple of oddities. It shows a lot of urls to the same page, but with different tracking code.The url with tracking code always follows a question mark and could look like: http://www.MozExampleURL.com?tracking-example http://www.MozExampleURL.com?another-tracking-examle http://www.MozExampleURL.com?tracking-example-3 etc So, the only thing that distinguishes one url from the next is a tracking url. On these pages, canonical tags are in place as: <link rel="canonical<a class="attribute-value">l</a>" href="http://www.MozExampleURL.com" /> So, why does the index have urls that are only different in terms of tracking urls? I would think it would ignore everything, starting with the question mark. The index also shows paginated pages. I would think it should show the one canonical url and leave it at that. Is this a problem about which something should be done? Best... Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Is all duplication of HTML title content bad?
In light of Hummingbird and that HTML titles are the main selling point in SERPs, is my approach to keyword rich HTML titles bad? Where possible I try to include the top key phrase to descripe a page and then a second top keyphrase describing what the company/ site as a whole is or does. For instance an estate agents site could consist of HTML title such as this Buy Commercial Property in Birmingham| Commercial Estate Agents Birmingham Commercial Property Tips | Commercial Estate Agents In order to preserve valuable characters I have also been omitting brand names other than on the home page... is this also poor form?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SoundinTheory0 -
App "Review" Website with DA of 58 - Good or Bad Link?
Hi, We have a web app. All our competitors are on http://www.appappeal.com. We can suggest ourselves here http://www.appappeal.com/contact/suggest. If we get reviewed and the link is a follow link is this a good thing or a bad thing. They call themselves a directory and you can pay to get a "priority" review. Should we avoid or is it a good link as the DA is 58?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Studio330 -
New links appeared, how do I test to see if they are good or bad?
I've just noticed 5 links appear via Majestic. Opensiteexplorer hasnt picked these up yet. I want to check if I should get these removed or leave them be. How can I check to see if the link is good or bad?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters0