Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Huge drop in rankins, traffic and impressions after changing to CloudFlare
-
Hi there,
In October, one of our customer's programmer made a change on their website to optimize its loading speed. Since then, the all the SEO's metrics has dropped. Apparently, the change was to move to CloudFlare and to add Gzip compression.
I was talking with the programmer and he told me he had no idea why that happened. Now comes 5 months later and the SEO metrics havn't come back yet. What seems so wierd is that two keywords in particular had the most massive drop. Those two keywords were the top keywords (more than 1k of impressions a month) and now its like there is no impressions or clics at all.
Did anyone had the same event occur to them? Do you have any idea what could help this case?
-
This can involve many factors
- Is the new website on a dedicated IP and SSL?
- Did all of the URLs stay the same?
- Did any new Link Farms or SPAM links get added?
- Was all of the content transferred? ALL
- Same meta data and internal linking as well?
- Did the client happen to change addresses?
-
Trying a Reverse-IP lookup via domain may also help the OP to assess any potential threat(s) in that area
-
Hey there,
I am not entirely surely this is 100% the case, but quickly looking over a couple of articles it sounds like CloudFlare may share IP's with some questionable sites that may be on a watch list. Getting static IP's and CDN SSL's may help.
Using a CDN for the reasons above is a good move, could you try switching to another provider to see if any impact is seen.
Cheers
Tim
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
520 Error from crawl report with Cloudflare
I am getting a lot of 520 Server Error in crawl reports. I see this is related to Cloudflare. We know 520 is Cloudflare so maybe the Moz team can change this from "unknown" to "Cloudflare 520". Perhaps the Moz team can update the "how to fix" section in the reporting, if they have some possible suggestions on how to avoid seeing these in the report of if there is a real issue that needs to be addressed. At this point I don't know. There must be a solution that Moz can provide like a setting in Cloudflare that will permit the Rogerbot if Cloudflare is blocking it because it does not like its behavior or something. It could be that Rogerbot is crawling my site on a bad day or at a time when we were deploying a massive site change. If I know when my site will be down can I pause Rogerbot? I found this https://developers.cloudflare.com/support/troubleshooting/general-troubleshooting/troubleshooting-crawl-errors/
Technical SEO | | awilliams_kingston0 -
Best way to change URL for already ranking pages
Hello. I have a lot of pages that I'm optimising. The ones I'm focusing on right now is already ranking, but the URLs could be better (they don't include the keywords right now). However I'm worried that if I change the URLs they will drop in rankings or have to start over. I would of course set up 301 redirect, but is there more I need to do? What is the best way to change URL for already ranking pages?
Technical SEO | | GoMentor0 -
Changing images on site without losing ranking
A number of images on my site rank very well under google image search but need to be replaced with updated versions. If I keep the file name and pixel dimensions identical will switching the image effect my rankings? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Justin450 -
Is there a way of changing the Permalink without getting the 404 Error?
Hi, I am new to this all.. Is there a way of changing the permalink for example from: domain/content/ to domain/profile/ without receiving the 404 error message. It's just that since my website has been developed, some pages and their content have changed but the permalink still shows the name of the old page which may be confusing. Ps. Please use most simple language for explanations as I am really new to it. Thank you! Ve
Technical SEO | | MissVe0 -
Dynamically changing a title with javascript
Hi, I asked our IT team to be able to write custom page titles in our CMS and they came up with a solution that writes the title dynamically with javascript. When I look on the page, I see the title in the browser, but when I look in the source code, I see the original page title. I am thinking that Google won't see the new javascript title, so it will not be indexed and have no impact on SEO. Am I right ?
Technical SEO | | jfmonfette0 -
Too Many On-Page Links - caused by a drop down menu
Many of our e-com sites we build for customers have drop down menus to help the user easily find products without having to click - Example: http://www.customandcommercial.com/ But this then causes the report to trigger too many on page links We do have a site map and a google site map So should I put code in place not to follow the drop down menu link items or leave in place?
Technical SEO | | spiralsites0 -
Difference between search volume in KWT and Impressions in GWT
Hi there, Sorry I've been a bit quiet of late, we're going through a huge rebranding exercise as well as staying on top of client work. Anyway. I've got an issue with keyword research phase of a client remarketing. Trying to decide which keywords to target (aren't we all?) The client has 3 months of back data in Google Webmaster Tools, which helps us to see Impressions, CTR and actual click-throughs etc. Now, they rank #1 on Google.com for a certain keyword (logged out, of course). According to Google Keyword tool (Logged in) there are 2.7million searches per month for this keyword. With the average CTR being 18% for a #1 keyword that should be bringing in 400k visits. However, take the same keyword in Google Webmaster Tools and the impressions are actually around 1,600 per month with a CTR of 9%. Different CTR's for different sectors I can accept. What I don't get is the vast difference between the impressions in GWT compared to the alleged search volume coming from the Keyword tool. Really need to understand this so we can better select keywords and judge approximate traffic expected if ranking #1 for a keyword. Any help would be really useful. Thank you!
Technical SEO | | Nobody15609869897230 -
Sudden ranking drop, no manual action
Sort of a strange situation I'm having and I wanted to see if I could get some thoughts. Here's what has happened... Monday morning, I realized that my website, which had been showing up at the bottom of page 2 for a specific result, had now been demoted to the bottom of page 6 (roughly a 40 spot demotion). No other keyword searches were affected. I immediately figured that this was some sort of keyword-specific penalty that I had incurred. I had done a bit of link building over the weekend (two or three directory type sites and a bio link from a site I contribute to). I also changed some anchor text on another site to match my homepage's title tag (which just so happened to be the exact phrase match I had dropped in) - I assumed this was what got me. I was slowly beginning to climb up the rankings and just got a bit impatient/overzealous. Changed the anchor text back to what it originally was and submitted a reconsideration request on Tuesday. This morning, I get the automated response in Webmaster Tools that no manual action had been taken. So my question is, would this drop have been an automated deal? If that's the case, then it's going to be mighty hard to pinpoint what I did wrong, since there's no way to know when I did whatever it was to cause the drop. Any ideas/thoughts/suggestions to regain my modest original placement?
Technical SEO | | sandlappercreative0
