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
-
Sudden Drop in Mobile Core Web Vitals
Web Vitals Screengrab.PNG For some reason, after all URLs being previously classified as Good, our Mobile Web Vitals report suddenly shifted to the above, and it doesn't correspond with any site changes on our end. Has anyone else experience something similar or have any idea what might have caused such a shift? Curiously I'm not seeing a drop in session duration, conversion rate etc. for mobile traffic despite the seemingly sudden change.
Technical SEO | | rwat0 -
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 -
How does changing sitemaps affect SEO
Hi all, I have a question regarding changing the size of my sitemaps. Currently I generate sitemaps in batches of 50k. A situation has come up where I need to change that size to 15k in order to be crawled by one of our licensed services. I haven't been able to find any documentation on whether or not changing the size of my sitemaps(but not the pages included in them) will affect my rankings negatively or my SEO efforts in general. If anyone has any insights or has experienced this with their site please let me know!
Technical SEO | | Jason-Reid0 -
Changing images on site without losing ranking
A number of images on my site rank very well under google image search but need to be replaced with updated versions. If I keep the file name and pixel dimensions identical will switching the image effect my rankings? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Justin450 -
Drop Down Menu - Link Juice Depletion
Hi, We have a site with 7 top level sections all of which contain a large number of subsections which may then contain further sub sections. To try and ensure the best user experience we have a top navigation with the 7 top level sections and when hovered a selection of the key sub sections. Although I like this format for the user as it makes it easier for them to find the most important sections / sub sections it does lead to a lot of links within every page on the site. In general each top section has a drop down with approx 10 - 15 subsections. This has therefore lead to SeoMoz's tools issuing its too many internal links warning. Then alongside this I am left wondering if I shouldn’t have to many links to my subsections and whether I would be better off being more selective of when I link to them. For instance I could choose the top 5 sub sections and place a link to them from our homepage and by doing so I would be passing a greater amount of link juice down the line. So I guess my dilemma is between ensuring the user has as easy a time traversing the site as possible whilst I try to keep a close watch on where, and how, our link juice is distributed. One solution I am considering is whether no-follow links could be utilised within the drop down menus? This way I could then have the desired user navigation and I would be in greater control of what pages link to which sub sections. Would that even work? Any advice would be greatly appreciated, Regards, Guy
Technical SEO | | guycampbell1 -
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 -
Changing DNS -- SEO implications?
Hey Moz, We're migrating an old site on an old server over to a new server/DNS. The plan is to keep the same URL structure and reuse our existing URL's. As long as we make minimal changes to each page's content, we should be able to update our DNS entry and get all the pages recreated and assigned to their correct URLs without any reduction in SEO rankings. Is this correct? This site gets a lot of organic traffic and ranks highly on some challenging keywords, so it's key that we retain our rankings as much as possible. I've read that it's wise to lower the DNS time-to-live to one hour, about a day before the move, to help Google crawl the DNS a little quicker. Are there any other recommendations you guys can offer or past experiences?
Technical SEO | | stephen_reply0 -
Changing CMS, are there SEO effects?
We want to change our cms from typo3 to CMS made Simple. We have done this already for another site and it effected the rankings. Have you got experience with this? What factors are important for SEO to consider? Is it normal when you change from cms the rankings will drop?
Technical SEO | | PlusPort0