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
-
Domain Authority dropped 10 points and I don't know why
In my latest site crawl, the domain authority dropped 10 points for no apparent reason. There have been no changes to the site. The only change I have made this month is to block referral spam to the site. My competitors' DAs have stayed the same too. website name: https://knowledgefront.co.uk/ Any ideas?
Technical SEO | | LisaBabblebird0 -
URLs dropping from index (Crawled, currently not indexed)
I've noticed that some of our URLs have recently dropped completely out of Google's index. When carrying out a URL inspection in GSC, it comes up with 'Crawled, currently not indexed'. Strangely, I've also noticed that under referring page it says 'None detected', which is definitely not the case. I wonder if it could be something to do with the following? https://www.seroundtable.com/google-ranking-index-drop-30192.html - It seems to be a bug affecting quite a few people. Here are a few examples of the URLs that have gone missing: https://www.ihasco.co.uk/courses/detail/sexual-harassment-awareness-training https://www.ihasco.co.uk/courses/detail/conflict-resolution-training https://www.ihasco.co.uk/courses/detail/prevent-duty-training Any help here would be massively appreciated!
Technical SEO | | iHasco0 -
Organic Traffic Decrease WOW and YOY sitewide
My site is experiencing a decrease in organic traffic WOW for the last two weeks and for the first time all year is showing a decrease compared to last year's traffic for the same weeks. At first I thought this was a seasonal pattern due to spring break (we are mostly b to b), but the dip has sustained for another week. The only changes made during this time period were a few on-page updates and some title tag updates to a specific group of pages. However, the decrease is sitewide including branded clicks and impressions. I haven't noticed any changes in rankings. Impressions and clicks are down per Search Console, but CTR and Avg Rank haven't changed. Is it possible that we've been penalized or hit by an algo shift? What's the best way to know for sure? VLGLUTt
Technical SEO | | cckapow0 -
Domain prefix changed, will this impact SEO?
Our web development team have changed our domain prefix from www to non www due to a server change. Our SSL certificate would not be recognised under www and would produce a substantial error message when visiting the secure parts of our website. To prevent issues with old links they have added a permanent 301 redirect from www. to non www. urls until our sitemap catches up. Would this impact our SEO efforts or would it have no impact as a redirect has been placed? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Jseddon920 -
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 -
Google Impressions Drop Due to Expired SSL
Recently I noticed a huge drop in our clients Google Impressions via GWMT from 900 impressions to 70 overnight on October 30, 2012 and has remained this way for the entire month of November 2012. The SSL Cert had expired in mid October due to the notification message for renewal going to the SPAM folder and being missed. Is it possible for an SSL expiry to be related to this massive drop in daily impressions which in-turn has also effected traffic? I also can't see any evidence of duplicate pages (ie. https and http) being indexed but to be honest I'm not the one doing the SEO therefore haven't been tracking this. Thanks for your help! Chris
Technical SEO | | MeMediaSEO0 -
Cloudflare Email Address Protecting & SEO
I have a client who uses Cloudflare to protect their email address on their website from spam and when I crawl their site looking for errors it causes it to report multiple broken links on each page. Does anyone know how this impacts SEO? Should I recommend removing Cloudflare?
Technical SEO | | farlandlee0 -
How to Resolve Rankings Drop from a DDOS Attack?
Our rankings just plummeted on Tuesday across the board. There was a DDOS attack on Tuesday and since then the rankings went down and have stayed down, even though the DDOS attack has been resolved. Also, this is the 3rd or 4th attack they've encountered this year. How long could this last? How can we deal with this? Thanks
Technical SEO | | poolguy0
