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
-
Does location of my VPS and IP adress matter to Google's ranking?
We're busy with adding a German version of our webshop. Right now we're quit successful in The Netherlands with our webshop and SEO. I wonder if Google minds the location of the website (VPS) and IP address concerning SEO for our German webshop. If I Google on this subject I can not find a clear answer. Can somebody help me?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Makelmail0 -
Problems in indexing a website built with Magento
Hi all My name is Riccardo and i work for a web marketing agency. Recently we're having some problem in indexing this website www.farmaermann.it which is based on Magento. In particular considering google web master tools the website sitemap is ok (without any error) and correctly uploaded. However only 72 of 1.772 URL have been indexed; we sent the sitemap on google webmaster tools 8 days ago. We checked the structure of the robots.txt consulting several Magento guides and it looks well structured also.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | advmedialab
In addition to this we noticed that some pages in google researches have different titles and they do not match the page title defined in Magento backend. To conclude we can not understand if this indexing problems are related to the website sitemap, robots.txt or something else.
Has anybody had the same kind of problems? Thank you all for your time and consideration Riccardo0 -
If UGC on my site also exists elsewhere, is that bad? How should I properly handle it?
I work for a reviews site, and some of the reviews that get published on our website also get published on other reviews websites. It's exact duplicate content -- all user generated. The reviews themselves are all no-indexed; followed, and the pages where they live are only manually indexed if the reviews aren't duplicate. We leave all pages with reviews that live elsewhere on the web nofollowed. Is this how we should properly handle it? Or would it be OK to follow these pages regardless of the fact that technically, there's exact duplicate UGC elsewhere?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dunklea0 -
Removing Bad Links
Hi all, I am in the process of conducting a Link Audit and I am faced with quite a lot of seemingly poor quality examples, such as; http://gotogetaways.com/tag/cunard/ http://jobhiringlocalandabroad.blogspot.com/p/job-hiring-for-cruise-liner-orchestra.html http://lumukixu.xlx.pl/p-o-cruises-aurora.php To me these should be removed \ disavowed but I am getting a little resistence from stakeholders regarding the amount of links I am seeking to rid ourselves of - all are of a similar quality to my examples above... Just so that I know that I am not being 'over eager' with my audit, I welcome your opinions Thanks Andy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TomKing0 -
Search engine simulators are not finding text on my website. Do I have a problem with Javascript or AJAX?
My website text is not appearing in search engine simulators. Is there a problem with the javascript? Or perhaps AJAX is affecting it? Is there a tool I can use to examine how my website architecture is affecting how the site is crawled? I am totally lost. Help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ecigseo0 -
Experience with Google Disawow Tool and discovering bad back-links
Hi Community, is there any experience to tell here about the disawow tool from Google? Any review? It have helped revocer sites beaten by Penguin or penalized after WMT Unnatural Link building message? Which tools and methods you use to find bad back-links to submit for the disawow tool? Thanks for your feedback,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Braumueller0 -
Really bad technical SEO and Nofollow
I posted a question week ago about a client with really awful SEO errors to the tune of over 75k violations including massive duplicate content (over 8000 pages) and pages with too many links (homepage alone has over 300 links), and I was thinking, why not try to nofollow the product pages which are the ones causing so many issue. They have super low domain authority, and are wasting spider energy, have no incoming links. Thoughts? BTW the entire site is an ecommerce site wth millions of products and each product is its own wordpress blog post...YIKES! Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | runnerkik1 -
International IP redirection - help please!
Hi, We have a new client who has built a brand in the UK on a xyz.com domain. The "xyz.com" is now a brand and features on all marketing. Lots of SEO work has taken place and the UK site has good rankings and traffic. They have now expanded to the US and with offline marketing leading the way, xyz.com is the brand being pushed in the US. So with the launch of the offline marketing US IP's are now redirected to a US version of the site (subfolder) with relevant pricing and messaging. This is great for users, but with Googlebot being on a US IP it is also being redirected and the UK pages have now dropped out of the index. The solution we need would ideally have both UK and US users searching for xyz.com, but would see them land on respective static pages with correct prices. Ideally no link authority would be moved via redirection of users. We have considered the following solutions Move UK site to subfolder /uk and redirect UK ips to this subfolder (and so not googlebot) downside of this is it will massively impact the UK rankings which are the core driver of the business - also would this be deemed as illegal cloaking? natural links will always be to the xyz.com page and so longer term the US homepage will gain authority and UK homepage will be more reliant on artificial linkbuilding. Use a overlay that detects IP address and requests users to select relevant country (and cookies to redirect on second visit) this has been rejected by ecommerce team as will increase bounce rate% & we dont want users to be able to see other countries due to prduct and price differences. Use a homepage with country selection (and cookies to redirect on second visit) this has been rejected by ecommerce team as will increase bounce rate% & we dont want users to be able to see other countries due to prduct and price differences. Is there an easy solution to this problem that we're overlooking? Is there another way of legal cloaking we could use here? Many thanks in advance for any help here
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Red_Mud_Rookie0