Hi,
In November 2011 our eCommerce website dropped from between 3rd and 4th position in the UK SERPs down to 7th and 8th. A year after this happened, we still haven’t moved back up to the original ranking despite all our best efforts and we’re looking for a bit of insight into what could have happened. One of our theories is this, do you think it might be the problem?
In October 2011 we moved from a single-site custom built CMS hosted in the UK to a multi-site custom built CMS hosted on a much better server based in the UK. As part of this move we started using CloudFlare to help with security and performance (CloudFlare is a security CDN). Because CloudFlare’s servers are in the US, to the outside world it almost looks like we went from a slow hosting company in the UK to a much quicker hosting company in the US.
Could this have affected our rankings? We know that Google takes the server IP address into account as a ranking factor, but as far as we understand it’s because they (rightly) believe that a server closer to the user will perform better. So a UK server will serve up pages quicker to a visitor in the UK than a US server because the data has a shorter distance to travel.
However, we’re definitely not experiencing an issue with being recognised as a UK website. We have a .co.uk domain (which is obviously a big indicator) and if you click on “Pages from the UK” in the SERPs we jump up to 3rd place. So Google seems to know we’re a UK site.
Is the fact we’re using CloudFlare and hence hiding our real server IP address – is this penalising us in the SERPs?
Currently out of the 6 websites above us, 4 are in the US and 2 are in the UK. All of these are massive sites with lots of links, so smaller ranking factors might be more important for us. Obviously the big downside of not using CloudFlare is that our site becomes much less secure and it becomes much slower. Images and some static content is distributed via a local CloudFlare server, which means it should tick Google’s box in terms of providing a quick site for users.
CloudFlare say in a blog post that they used to have Google crawl rates and geo-tagging issues in the past when they were just starting out, but in 2010 they started working with “the big search engines” to make sure they treated CloudFlare like a CDN (so special rules that apply to Akamai also apply to CloudFlare). Since they’ve been working with Google, CloudFlare say that their customers will only see a positive SEO impact.
So at the moment we’re at a loss about what happened to our ranking. Google say they take IP’s into account for ranking, but by using CloudFlare it looks like we’re in the US. We definitely know we’re not having geo-tagging issues and CloudFlare say they’re working with Google to ensure its customers aren't seeing a negative impact by using CloudFlare, but a niggling part of us still wonders whether it could impact our SEO.
Many thanks, James