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
-
SEO Best Practice for Managing a Businesses NAP with Multiple Addresses
I have a client with multiple business addresses - 3 across 3 states, from an SEO perspective what would be the best approach for displaying a NAP on the website? So far I've read that its best: to get 3 GMB account to point to 3 location pages & use a local phone number as opposed to a 1300 number. Display all 3 locations in the footer, run of site
Local Website Optimization | | jasongmcmahon1 -
Suburb Pages
Hey Mozers, This is an old and often criticized method of SERP however we have a client who has requested we create suburb specific pages for their site. PLASTIC PLANTS "SUBURB" NEED PLASTIC PLANTS IN "SUBURB" They have shown us a competitor who is ranking for hundreds maybe thousands of suburbs in Australia using this method. Any thoughts or experience in this area would be appreciated.
Local Website Optimization | | wearehappymedia0 -
Multiple location pages are they bad?
Hello all, I am research some competitors of a client of mine. My client specializes in H.P. printer repair and over the last 8 years has lost market shares to the competition. I want to reclaim market share. As I was searching some of the service companies many have page that list multiple towns that they service. here is an example. http://printerrepairservice.com/locations-we-service/ Should I be recommending this to my client? To me it seems like a spam keyword process. I know an employee of this particular company and he say their online business is booming. I want my clients to boom too! What are your thoughts on these location type pages?
Local Website Optimization | | donsilvernail0 -
Passing Juice through Multiple Locations
Hey Gang, Thank you in advance for taking some time out of your day to read/comment on this. I really am thankful for this awesome community. SO, I just took over a locksmith client with over 20 different locations all up and down the west coast. They have some of their Google My Businesses ranking in the snap three. But most of them are not even close. The SEO that they had done was very 2012 and very messy. They have the name of the cities in their GMB profiles which is against google policy (although we haven't got taken down) Example: Instead of Locksmith plus they have Locksmith Plus Portland or Locksmith Plus Seattle. So their Citations are all over the place. Some locations have a bunch, and some locations I haven't even been able to put them on Yelp or Super pages (because they do not accommodate well at all for multi location business it's kind of been a nightmare) And Besides mediocre citations their websites are all over the place to. None of them are Linked to each other they each look like a separate brand. So here's my question(s) 1. I have a pretty good PBN network of my own real websites for clients that I have ranked to page one. I want to start Backlinking to just our one Main locksmith site (that ranks for no city) an have that juice flow into all the other sites but I am afraid I wont interlink them correctly and the juice will get wasted. Should I have like all the links to every cities website on the front page and point all my pbn at the front page? How to I link these bad boys correctly? Or should I... (next question) 2. Ok I know the Google my business does not care about how many citations we have but rather the quality of those citations. I already know we are having a brand crisis. We need to change all these listings to the same brand name but I am afraid google will spank us once we change and take down our number ones (so be it?) But My question is how much should I focus on back linking some of these page listings. Like should I be posting the naked Yelp URL on some of my web 2.0s (that link back to my main website)? Or what if i just had the main citations on the cities website so they could get some juice too? Confusing! Overall I know that Google wants clean consistent branding and that what we want to do.I just want to make sure everything is hooked up right so when I do make some Bad a** big content that every location can benefit from it. Guys thank you again. Much Loves and I hope every body had a great new year. Here's to a strong 2016
Local Website Optimization | | Meier0 -
Best way to remove spammy landing pages?
Hey Mozzers, We recently took over a website for a new client of ours and discovered that their previous webmaster had been using a WordPress plugin to generate 5,000+ mostly duplicated local landing pages. The pages are set up more or less as "Best (service) provided in (city)" I checked Google Webmaster Tools and it looks like Google is ignoring most of these spammy pages already (about 30 pages out of nearly 6,000 are indexed), but it's not reporting any manual webspam actions. Should we just delete the landing pages all at once or phase them out a few (hundred) at a time? Even though the landing pages are mostly garbage, I worry that lopping off over 95% of a site's pages in one fell swoop could have other significant consequences. Thanks!
Local Website Optimization | | BrianAlpert780 -
Can anyone recommend small UK based SEO Consultancy companies?
Hi there, We're possibly looking for a small, completely whitehat SEO firm here in the UK to work with us from early next year. We've probably got a budget of around £200 - £300 a month. We're looking for top up work really, not a complete campaign. I've checked out http://moz.com/community/recommended but it's not broken down by region or budget. I had an embarrassing phone call with Distilled who it turns out charge £10,000 a month minimum! Can anyone recommend anyone to speak to?
Local Website Optimization | | jennie.evans0 -
URL structure for local SEO
Hi fokes, question; which url structure is best for local rankings. For example: when I want to rank on the keyword: "Plumber Londen". And I dont have plumber in my brand. What is the best url structure: example.com/plumber/londen example.com/plumber-londen
Local Website Optimization | | remkoallertz1 -
Local SEO + Best Practice for locations
Hi All, Based on a hypothetical scenario, lets say you are a plumber. You live and operate within Chelsea in London. You have established a Google places profile and incorporated schema data to tell Google your fixed place location. In addition you operate in several nearby towns with no fixed location presence. i.e Brentford, Bromley, Catford, Cheswick and Tottenham. I create a feature rich page on 'How to find a quality plumber'. Within the page I incorporate the following description: blah blah, as a quality plumber serving the community of Chelsea, we also offer our services to nearby towns of Brentford, Bromley, Catford, Cheswick and Tottenham. I create hyperlinks for the towns (Brentford, Bromley, Catford, Cheswick and Tottenham) that allow the user see in details a full list of services, operation hours, etc. Naturally all towns will have there own unique content (no duplication). Question
Local Website Optimization | | Mark_Ch
Is the above scenario the correct way to provide local seo or is this approach considered spammy to Google? Thanks Mark0