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
-
Drop in Rankings
Hello Webmasters, My site has incurred a sudden dip in rankings across sections. We conducted an analysis and have observed the following two major issues: Unnatural Links Penalty: Our site was issued an Unnatural Links Penalty on May 23. Basically, we have both 'http' and 'https' versions of our website registered on Webmaster tools. Initially, the warning showed up on the 'http' version and thus we started a cleanup by extracting the linking domains and have also filed a reconsideration request once all the spammy domains were removed and rightly disavowed. Recently, we got another manual action warning on the 'https' version regarding the unnatural links. So we have started with the cleanup activity right away. While analyzing this issue, we came across another major problem regarding the two versions which is our next concern and is mentioned below. https Canonical Issue: For more insights, we went through our site’s content and found that our website is following the below pattern Our 'http' version of the webpages get 301 redirected to the 'https' version. This 'https' version again has a canonical pointing to the 'http' version thus creating a loop. To conclude, I request your valuable learnings and thoughts on the following: Which of these issues are likely to have affected our website’s ranking Which version is likely to be preferred by Google (https or http) in our case
Technical SEO | | Starcom_Search0 -
Help: domain name change and Google News
Hi. I work for a regional news source, and our (separate) Spanish-language news publication recently changed its domain name. The publication lost its Google News inclusion. Most of their traffic came from Google News, so traffic tanked. They're trying to get back in. They reapplied but didn't get approved. They're now in the 30-day waiting period to reapply again. The website is run by a third-party company, which handled the domain name change in April (2015). That company has been running their site for a couple of years. Our in-house devs' hands are tied on helping, because we (at the mother company) don't manage their site. This third party has not been responsive. The Spanish pub folks have reached out to me to help them prepare for Round 2 of reapplication. I'm the mothership in-house SEO, but I've never experienced this situation before. Because everything seems to be in order besides the ham-handed changes, my best advice to them so far is: You'll have to wait until Google gets to know you again, unfortunately. Does that sound right? Any pointers out there for bringing their best possible A-game to the next round?
Technical SEO | | christyrobinson1 -
Google Not Recognizing Domain Name Change
It has been over a month since we have switch https://www.iwdextensions.com
Technical SEO | | lsujoe
to
https://www.iwdagency.com/extensions/ Yet Google is still ranking the old domain name in their search results. https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=iwd extensions Are we doing something wrong or does it take Google more than a month to update their results for this type of change? We have 301 redirected the old url to the new one and submitted a domain name change in GWT. Let me know your thoughts!0 -
How to change the woocommerce product page permalink
How I can change the product URL structure. Please let me know how to fix woocommerce permalink in wordpress. My current URL is http://www.ayurjeewan.com/product/divya-ashmarihar-kwath and I want to like (only post name) http://www.ayurjeewan.com/divya-ashmarihar-kwath Attached is the screenshot of option available. qa2hZMP.jpg
Technical SEO | | JordanBrown0 -
My Alexa ranking dropped after a 301 redirect is that bad?
I had all of my non www pages redirect to the www versions. My alexa ranking dropped and keeps dropping after I did this. I'm guessing its because its tracking the non www version. Does anyone know if this is correct and should I worry?
Technical SEO | | CandleCam0 -
Importance of WMT change of address and problem doing it
Hi, How important is it to submit a change of address in WMT? I say that because I am having problems doing it so wondered if it was worth the hassle in trying to fix it. I am getting the error: "We couldn't verify website.co.uk. To submit a change of address, website.co.uk must be verified using the same method as www.website.co.uk. Add website.co.uk to your account and verify ownership, then try again." I have looked on the web to try and find an answer and have come across 2 suggestions: You might have lost the verification with the redirect. If you used a metatag on the home page, the home page is now redirecting. If you had uploaded a verification text file, that file is probably now gone and redirecting as well. You probably need to re-verify the site. Either re-upload the text file and configure it not to redirect (may be difficult) or use the DNS server verification method. You need to verify the non www. version of the website because that's the way Google like it. Not sure why solution 2 would be necessary but it does seem to be what WMT are getting. Because the site already redirects, 1 would then come in to play. Is it worth persevering with because IT will be getting a long list of stuff to do from me as it is.... Thanks all
Technical SEO | | Houses0 -
My Old Domain is Not Changing in Google
I have taken over the following domain www.choice-cottages.co.uk, part of the contract was to re-direct the old site www.choicecottages.info to the new site. Unfortunately I am only a middle man in the arrangement as the website is hosted with another company. The switch was done well over 4 weeks ago, the re-direct itself is working fine. However if you google choice cottages you will see the first listing is www.choicecottages.info, then I have my new site below for a few listings. Google is definitely updating something as before the old domain had lots of site links but this has reduced to a few. Does anyone know anything on this, as in the past it only takes a couple of days to update. Many thanks Andy
Technical SEO | | iprosoftware0 -
Problems with changing the page title on Wordpress Site...
The website is http://www.masterpieceinteriors.co.uk/ I'm not sure why the homepage title is reading 'masterpieces' in Google but looks fine here. There seem to be 2 versions of the homepage coming up in google - you can see them both by searching 'masterpieceinteriors' and then 'masterpiece interiors'. Some help would be hugely appreciated!
Technical SEO | | Opiyo0