What is the effect of CloudFlare CDN on page load speeds, hosting IP location and the ultimate SEO effect?
-
Will using a CDN like CloudFlare.com confuse search engines in terms of the location (IP address) of where the site is actually physically hosted especially since CloudFlare distributes the site's content all around the globe?
I understand it is important that if customers are mostly in a particular city it makes sense to host on an IP address in the same city for better rankings, all things else being equal?
I have a number of city-based sites but does it make having multiple hosting plans in multiple cities/ countries (to be close to customers) become suddenly a ridiculous thing with a CDN? In other words should I just reduce it down to having one hosting plan anywhere and just use the CDN to distribute it?
I am really struggling with this concept trying to understand if I should consolidate all my hosting plans under one, or if I should get rid of CloudFlare entirely (can it cause latency in come cases) and create even more locally-based hosting plans (like under site5.com who allow many city hosting plans).
I really hope you can help me somehow or point me to an expert who can clarify this confusing conundrum. Of course my overall goal is to have:
1. lowest page load times
2. best UX
3. best rankingsI do realise that other concepts are more important for rankings (great content, and links etc.) but assuming that is already in place and every other factor is equal, how can I fine tune the hosting to achieve the desirable goals above?
Many thanks!
Mark -
Well good luck with 100/100 but you should be good to get a 90-ish score.
-Andy
-
Hey thanks Andy,
I have learned a few things regarding the Page Speed Insights and was able to make a few changes regarding expiry times on cache, which increased the score.
I will tweak the suggestions some more to try to get the score to 100/100 for Mobile and Desktop, if that's possible to get 100/100.
Thanks for letting me know about that.
Regards,
Mark -
Hi Mark,
Have you run the site through Page Speed Insights? What does Google suggest? It might be that you can get some good speed increases just by making .htaccss changes.
-Andy
-
Thanks Andy, sorry I just noticed the settings button where you can pick the international locations, it wasn't obvious to me before.
Whichever page I choose, http://theatrebuddies.us it is taking between 2 and 4 seconds to load, which doesn't seem great?
I am not sure if this is a hosting issue or something to do with javascript on the page which affects load time, it's very hard to say.
I wonder if anyone can recommend a Web host with the fastest possible shared hosting, if that has anything to do with it and I could set up a plan and load one page and do a comparison.
Many thanks again.
- Mark
-
With most of these you can't Mark. You can set a different country on Pingdom, but that is about as much flexibility that you get.
-Andy
-
Hi Andy,
How can I test page load speed if when using the tool above, it does not recognise where I am? It seem to think I am in a different location globally each time I try.
Thanks so much,
Mark
-
P.S. All 148 of my sites are hosted in the US. I guess the reason I am asking is that it has been hideously time-consuming setting up all these sites that to break them up into all sorts of locally-based hosting plans would take me weeks of fiddling, down-time etc. which I've already gone though earlier this year. I moved things via CloudFlare because some sites were hacked so it sent me down a wormhole of trying to learn Web security and put best practices in place. So it's not like I have one site to move somewhere ... any answer may have huge implications in terms of the effort required to put best practices in place for all my sites. Many thanks again!
-
Hi Josh,
Thank you very much for your kind assistance! Makes sense.
I posted a reply to another response above, where I guess I fleshed out my concerns perhaps a bit better (sorry it's a very confusing thing for me to sort out here). I would be very interested and grateful to hear your comments on it.
Have a great day.
Mark -
Hi Andy,
Thanks so much for that.It is really hard for me to tell what the user's experience is since I am in Australia and users are in 7 other countries and I am not sure how to determine the UX of a person in another city.
To me it seems the sites are serving fast enough even for me here; but since the Web is so hyper-competitive, I am just trying to fine tune in every conceivable area as much as possible, with the belief that lots of little things added up is a good thing, even if they are not the top 3 determining factors of ranking but still important.
In some cases, certain sites only allow users to join if they are within a particular city so the site is totally city-specific. In this case it may make sense to not use CloudFlare but just buy hosting within that city with that city's IP address. Would that be true? It seems to me that a site for people in a certain city only would get better rankings if it's server's IP address was within the same city?
CloudFlare does have a server in this city as well.I have experienced seeing some subdomains serving so slowly through CloudFare that a warning page comes up that it could not be served (page fail) ... yet with CF suppressed, the pages serve fine, so this is a concern, but maybe it was a random instance I'm not really sure.
Thing is, because of the protection of CloudFlare it feels better to have it in place(?)
My main concern is also centred around the idea that if content is cached and distributed over dozens of servers on a CDN ... and we do a "Who's hosting" the domain and it says 'CloudFlare' then for SEO purposes in terms of serving the most relevant content to people in their local area, then how does the IP address of the hosting affect ranking within a local area? In other words, if some content is cached (e.g. images) and served via CF and the rest of the content is HTML and not cached and served from the origin server ... in effect, 'where is the home of the site' i.e. if the site is hosted in the UK because most of its customer base is in the UK (but also in other countries) then how do rankings for keywords work in the UK compared to other countries? I would think without CF the site would appear more UK-specific and UK-centric; but with CF in place ... the context of the hosting is totally lost / confused?
Many thanks for your assistance.
Best regards,
Mark -
Hi Mark,
First of all, have you tested your sites to see how they are in terms of speed? I would suggest checking with...
My own personal experience is that it can cause real issues in terms of page load times - to the point I have had clients drop it altogether. Out side of that, I can't advise on the best way to utilise it.
Are you finding that your experience is a good or bad one so far?
-Andy
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
-
Matching page for keyword doesn't show in search
Hello! I'm having an issue with my website Rooms Index, the website is in Hebrew so I'll provide examples in English for better understandings. When I'm searching Rooms by Hour in Haifa, google doesn't show the intended category page which is this, instead it shows my homepage in the results, this happens only for certain areas, while other areas are working well such as Tel aviv. For example if I searched day use in Las Vegas it'd show me the Las Vegas page dayuse.com/las-vegas, but searching for Brooklyn I'd only see dayuse.com. the pages are indexed and I can find them if I search site:roomsindex.co.il what could cause such problem?
Local Website Optimization | | AviramAdar0 -
Mysterious Location Based SERP Disappearance
Hi Everyone, I've got a bit of a confusing SEO issue which I'm hoping you'll be able to help with. Apologies in advance for the long post, I've put an abridged version below also. We have one main keyword and it seems to have disappeared in some locations. The main keyword is "clothing manufacturers" and up until recently we had stability for almost a year. We're based in London, England and we regularly check "clothing manufacturers" to see where we're showing in search, and we usually see between 3rd - 5th. We use AHREFS to track rankings and noticed recently that "clothing manufacturers" had disappeared totally. We asked some people in different areas of the country to check where we were showing in search - one in Somerset, one in Liverpool, one in Beckingham and we used a VPN in Manchester. In all of these areas we aren't ranking for our main keyword at all. In London though we're 5th which is the lower end of normal. We then checked other keywords and it turns out "Clothes manufacturers" is one we're also not ranking for outside of London. However for "clothing manufacturers uk" and "clothes manufacturers uk" we are ranking for in every location we have tried. "Clothing manufacturers uk" is currently the keyword which brings us the most traffic. There are no manual penalties in webmaster tools, but looking at analytics it looks like our impressions for the main keyword have been down over the past 90 days, so we think we have had a problem and not realised for some time. Around a week before we see that our traffic for "clothing manufacturers" dropped, we made some structural changes to the website homepage, where we added LSIs, more H2s, more long tail keywords and more content, taking the copy from around 500 words to around 1100 words. This was in an effort to make the homepage less keyword stuffed and more natural. As a result of this we saw an overall increase in traffic and enquiries, and that's the reason we didn't notice for so long that traffic from "clothing manufacturers" has dropped so badly. Our first thought is that this might be something to do with Schema. Our website was until last week using a schema which included our "postal address" which is our physical office location in London. The schema was implemented in June 2017 and we have noticed that 3 months after implementing the schema, in October, our traffic fell dramatically for our main keyword, "clothing manufacturers". At the same time, our traffic for "clothing manufacturers uk" increased dramatically. Interestingly, the schemas used by our competitors don't include their office addresses and they show up all over the country for "clothing manufacturers" and "clothes manufacturers". One of our competitors is physically within half a mile of us. Have you guys seen a schema limit a company to searches only in one locality before? We have now removed the address from the schema to see if we start ranking all over the country again, like we used to before we implemented it. If this is the problem then it could take 3 months to turn around like it did for us to get in to this situation (Schema implemented June 2017, traffic fell October 2017). We're therefore trying to investigate every possibility to ensure we leave no stone unturned. Do you have any thoughts on the problem and if it could be schema related, or possibly something else? Thank you in advance! TL:DR Keywords "clothing manufacturers" and "clothes manufacturers" no longer ranking around the UK. Still ranking in London where we are based. Still ranking well for "clothing manufacturers uk" and "clothes manufacturers uk". Traffic for "clothing manufacturers" dropped 3 months after implementing schema and one week after making changes to website homepage (increased word count, added long tail keywords, LSIs and H2s). Schema included "postal address" which we notice none of our competitors have. They rank all over the country for "clothing manufacturers". One of our competitors is based within half a mile of us in London. Could having the address in the schema limit us to one locality? Could it be something else entirely?
Local Website Optimization | | rswhtn0 -
Difficulty Ranking Two Locations in the Same City
We are in the self-storage business and have locations through the Pacific Northwest. As we grow, there are cities where we've added multiple (2-3) locations. But we're discovering that we're having a great deal of difficulty ranking for all of these. For instance, we have two locations in Vancouver, WA. One is West Coast Self-Storage Vancouver, and the other is West Coast Self-Storage Padden Parkway. Both are in Vancouver, WA, but for the most part, only West Coast Self-Storage Vancouver is getting ranked. In fact, on those searches where Vancouver ranks, Padden Parkway doesn't show up anywhere. Not in the top 10 pages anyway. Each location has an outer landing page and an inner details page. On each page, we've placed unique, city-optimized keywords in the URL, Page Title, h1s, content. Of course each location has a separate NAP. Each location also has its own GMB page. Each location has a decent amount of reviews across multiple sites (Google, Yelp, GetFiveStars.) Both locations were previously on their own domain until a year ago when they were redirected to their current URLs. Both of those original domains were close to the same age. With the Padden Parkway location, we've tried to be even more hyper-local, by including the address in the URLs and in the h1 of the outer page. We've also created an h2 that references local neighborhoods around the business. We're also running into this situation in at least one other city, so I'm wondering if this has something to do with our url structure. Other businesses in our space use the URL structure of domain.com/state/city/location. We only go down to the state level. What are we missing?
Local Website Optimization | | misterfla0 -
Home Page Not Ranking for Brand
I've got an odd issue (that I've never encountered in 12+ years in SEO). A client's home page isn't ranking for their brand term. It's a medical spa in Las Vegas, so physical location that takes online appointments. We have an online booking system (which isn't a good one) that originally had a booking page replacing our home page. My thought is that Google associated that page as our home page because it was a stronger domain and the booking page is most used. That tool didn't allow the booking page to be noindexed (I know, crazy)- so I changed the name inside the booking tool away from the brand name as to not have both the site and the booking site optimized for the brand. Other things I've checked: The home page is indexed Home page canonical tag points to itself Title tag contains brand name at front (rest of site it's at the end) Robots.txt is accurate (allows home page) XML sitemap contains home page (and accurate for other pages) To make this even more confusing, if you search the brand name the physical location appears on the right rail with accurate URL. Any other ideas that I may be missing?
Local Website Optimization | | karmadigital0 -
Call Tracking Best Practises for General SEO
Hey folks, So I'm aware of the importance of consistent citations, and the mayhem call tracking numbers have been known to cause in regards to that in that past. So just wanted some up to date clarification on these two things: Local SEO isn't strictly speaking a big deal for us as we supply a software and as such are technically global. I'm presuming consistent citations are still worth aiming for though, and will help increase general authority as well? Let me know if I'm totally wrong about that! What's the best practise set up for call tracking, given that your main NAP number you'd obviously want hardcoded somewhere, alongside showing your dynamic numbers to relevant visitors. Apologies for any ignorance, as always any help and advice is muchos appreciato.
Local Website Optimization | | Zoope1 -
Business location in small town - How to target meta title?
So it's common practice to include the city/state in page titles and within the content. However let's say that a business is located in a small town, but serves customers in surrounding, larger towns. You might say that it's not worth mentioning the small town because there would be few searchers in that area. However, does Google take into account the distance a searcher is from the business location, in relation to the page title, as well as the Google my Business page? Obviously you can't go stuffing all of the surrounding towns into your homepage or main service pages. Is there any value in mentioning the small town, or is it fine to leave it out too? What has been your experience?
Local Website Optimization | | OliverNeely0 -
Removed huge spammy location footer, looking to rebuild traffic the right way
Hello, On this site, I removed a huge spammy location footer with hundreds of cities, states, and dog training types. The traffic and rankings have gone down a lot, and I'd like a discussion on how to rebuild things the right way. There's some local adjustments to be made to the home page content, but other than that: My plans: 1. Analyze top 10 Google analytics keyword queries and work them into the content as best as possible, though I am debating whether the client should make new pages and how many. 2. I'm going to suggest he add a lot of content to the home page, perhaps a story about a dog training that he did in Wisconsin. I'll think about what else. Any advice is appreciated. Thanks.
Local Website Optimization | | BobGW0 -
Schema training/resources for local SEO?
I am currently in the process of apply schema for dozens of clients (many are large retailers). Although I am not a developer, I do know the basics of schematic markup & structured data. I do work with a development team and I'm trying to provide them with schema application best practices. Obviously there are many good articles/blog posts out there about schema. However I'm looking for a more substantial training course, webinar or resource website about schema application. Does anybody have any good recommendations?
Local Website Optimization | | RosemaryB0