Cloudflare - Should I be concerned about false positives and bad neighbourhood IP problems
-
I am considering using cloudflare for a couple of my sites.
What is your experience?I researched a bit and there are 3 issues I am concerned about:
-
google may consider site bad neighbourhood in case other sites on same DNS/IP are spammy.
Any way to prevent this? Anybody had a problem? -
ddos attack on site on same DNS could affect our sites stability.
-
blocking false positives. Legitimate users may be forced to answer captchas etc. to be able to see the page. 1-2% of legit visitor were reported by other moz member to be identified as false positive.
Can I effectively prevent this by reducing cloudflare basic security level?
Also did you experience that cloudflare really helped with uptime of site? In our case whenever our server was down for seconds also cloudflare showed error page and sometimes cloudflare showed error page that they could not connect even when our server response time was just slow but pages on other domains were still loading fine.
-
-
Thanks Cyrus.
-
You may be interested in this post titled "Cloudflare and SEO" : https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-and-seo/
"We did a couple things. First, we invented a new technology that, when it detects a problem on a site, automatically changes the site's CloudFlare IP addresses to isolate it from other sites. (Think of it like quarantining a sick patient.) Second, we worked directly with the crawl teams at the big search engines to make them aware of how CloudFlare worked. All the search engines had special rules for CDNs like Akamai already in place. CloudFlare worked a bit differently, but fell into the same general category. With the cooperation of these search teams we were able to get CloudFlare's IP ranges are listed in a special category within search crawlers. Not only does this keep sites behind them from being clustered to a least performant denominator, or incorrectly geo-tagged based on the DNS resolution IP, it also allows the search engines to crawl at their maximum velocity since CloudFlare can handle the load without overburdening the origin."
-
Thanks Tom.
I will move now one of my main domains and will use their PRO plan. Noticed they have quite a number of settings to address the false positives. Our problem with cloudflare error pages may have been a temporary one while they where building the cache of the site. Anyway it is easy to enable/disable the cloudflare protection. So not much risk here. Could save us of a lot of potential headache in the future if it works as advertised. -
Hi,
-
I have used CloudFlare for a few sites and never had an issue with this. It is a risk/concern with all shared hosting, but CloudFlare are very proactive about addressing anything impacting their customers, so I would not have a concern on this side of things at all.
-
Again, I wouldn't have concerns here. CloudFlare are very adept at handling large-scale DDOS attacks . Having read some of their post-attack analysis reports, they usually mitigate any impact to customers very quickly. They have loads of customers, and if this sort of thing was an issue I think we'd hear about it fairly often.
-
I can't speak to the % of users that might get falsely identified as a risk and presented a CAPTCHA, but I'd be very surprised if it was as high as 1-2%; I've rarely seen that CAPTCHA screen myself. You should check what CloudFlare have to say on this issue, but I would have no concern here either.
I have never had an issue with CloudFlare impacting SEO performance or impacting the user experience. It has generally performed well for me, but the biggest issue I see with it is people hoping it is a 'cure all' and means they don't need to properly address issues affecting the performance of their site. If your database performance is very poor, meaning dynamic pages take a long time to load, then CloudFlare is not the answer (it may help - but you should address the underlying issue).
I am unsure about the issue with CloudFlare failing when your server is slow - I'd imagine CloudFlare support could help you with this - there may be a configuration option somewhere.
Overall - my suggestion would be that you go for it.
-
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
-
Can some one help how to fix spam problem. please see the attached file
Hi have spam link issue in my website at attaching report please help to fix this so my domain can get better. thanks. aEP1vVy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | grbassi0 -
SPA (angularJS) Ranking Problem
Hello dear experts; I working on SPA website with More than 20,000 indexed pages by Google there is a problem that I involved with: 1- Some pages had a good ranking on google.com but from a week ago, ranks one by one, dropped and homepage Replaced. for example, URL: https://cafegardesh.com/tours-dubai removes and https://cafegardesh.com replaced. Google still see the page when I use Fetch as Google tool. I can't understand what happens Is there anyone can find my site problems?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cafegardesh0 -
23k Links from one doman pointing to a single page, good or bad?
Hey all, So I found a domain that GWT tells me has 23k links pointing to a landing page. I found that the link is part of their global nav as a text ad and that's why it's probably registering so many links. The site has a DA of 56, is this a bad thing? Could it be hurting the rest of my site's ability to rank? Thanks, Roman
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Dynata_panel_marketing0 -
Will obfuscating HTML have a bad effect on my ranking?
I would like to obfuscate my HTML so that people do not see that I used a Template on my site. Does obfuscating HTML have a bad effect on the ranking in google? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RWW0 -
Is Google indexing Mp3 audio and MIDI music files? Can that cause any duplicate problems?
Hello, I own virtualsheetmusic.com website and we have several thousands of media files (Mp3 and MIDI files) that potentially Google can index. If that's the case, I am wondering if that could cause any "duplicate" issues of some sort since many of such media files have exact file names or same meta information inside. Any thoughts about this issue are very welcome! Thank you in advance to anyone.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Is removing inorganic links a bad idea?
Hey there, We have recently been in touch with a SEO agency that recomended we remove all inorganic links from our backlink profile. Most of the links are pretty good but there are some news sites that have sitewide links to our site. The link is in the nav menu, as a useful link. We didn't ask for this link it was totally organic. Also some link building in the past was focused on anchor text so some of the keywords may have been over emphasised. Is it a good idea to go about removing all of the potentially inorganic looking links? My concern is that we wipe out links that google are actually valuing. I still know sites are ranking #1 with much more dubious backlink profiles, and then there's this guy who removed his sitewide backlinks and dropped in his ranking: http://www.seomoz.org/q/removed-site-wide-links If a competitor decided to add negative links to our site, it would take longer to find and remove negative links than it would for them to add them. It seems odd that google would allow negative SEO to be that easy.. What do you think?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | timscullin0 -
Duplicate peices of content on multiple pages - is this a problem
I have a couple of WordPress clients with the same issue but caused in different ways: 1. The Slash WP theme which is a portfolio theme, involves setting up multiple excerpts of content that can then be added to multiple pages. So although the pages themselves are not identical, there are the same snippets of content appearing on multiple pages 2. A WP blog which has multiple categories and/or tags for each post, effectively ends up with many pages showing duplicate excerpts of content. My view has always been to noindex these pages (via Yoast), but was advised recently not to. In both these cases, even though the pages are not identical, do you think this duplicate content across multiple pages could cause an issue? All thoughts appreciated
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chammy0 -
How to solve a PHP problem to increase user experience ?
Hi all, I am having a peculiar PHP problem that is affecting the user experience of the site and thus, the SEO. The site is www.atlantiksurf.com and as you can see I use the QTranslate Plugin to manage the 3 different languages: www.atlantiksurf.com (Spanish) www.atlantiksurf.com/en www.atlantiksurf.com/de If you enter the german version: http://www.atlantiksurf.com/de/ , and you scroll down to the bottom of the page, you will notice there are a couple of posts that have (Español) in their Titles. This means that this particular post is written in Spanish and should only appear in the Spanish version of the site. Every single post is published on the three versions even when they are language orientated. The result is that when you press that specific Spanish title on the German version, you get nothing but this: http://www.atlantiksurf.com/de/aritz-aranburu-tendra-que-estar-un-mes-sin-competir/ Because obviously there is nothing there. If I go to the wordpress admin panel and search for the post manually, I can solve the problem by erasing all the default code of the different language versions that should not appear. But this is only a manual and non practical solution. The problem, I think, might be in the PHP orders that the Wordpress Theme is receiving from somewhere. I come to all of you SEomoz users as my last chance, because I've been months in discussions with Qtranslate users and php amateurs that cannot solve the issue. I know that this question isn't strictly about SEO, but in a way it is, because it must be affecting the way that Google look at us. Please, some help or orientation would be highly appreciated. rTqZI.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tintanus0