What is the effect of CloudFlare CDN on page load speeds, hosting IP location and the ultimate SEO effect?
-
Will using a CDN like CloudFlare.com confuse search engines in terms of the location (IP address) of where the site is actually physically hosted especially since CloudFlare distributes the site's content all around the globe?
I understand it is important that if customers are mostly in a particular city it makes sense to host on an IP address in the same city for better rankings, all things else being equal?
I have a number of city-based sites but does it make having multiple hosting plans in multiple cities/ countries (to be close to customers) become suddenly a ridiculous thing with a CDN? In other words should I just reduce it down to having one hosting plan anywhere and just use the CDN to distribute it?
I am really struggling with this concept trying to understand if I should consolidate all my hosting plans under one, or if I should get rid of CloudFlare entirely (can it cause latency in come cases) and create even more locally-based hosting plans (like under site5.com who allow many city hosting plans).
I really hope you can help me somehow or point me to an expert who can clarify this confusing conundrum. Of course my overall goal is to have:
1. lowest page load times
2. best UX
3. best rankingsI do realise that other concepts are more important for rankings (great content, and links etc.) but assuming that is already in place and every other factor is equal, how can I fine tune the hosting to achieve the desirable goals above?
Many thanks!
Mark -
Well good luck with 100/100
but you should be good to get a 90-ish score.-Andy
-
Hey thanks Andy,
I have learned a few things regarding the Page Speed Insights and was able to make a few changes regarding expiry times on cache, which increased the score.
I will tweak the suggestions some more to try to get the score to 100/100 for Mobile and Desktop, if that's possible to get 100/100.
Thanks for letting me know about that.
Regards,
Mark -
Hi Mark,
Have you run the site through Page Speed Insights? What does Google suggest? It might be that you can get some good speed increases just by making .htaccss changes.
-Andy
-
Thanks Andy, sorry I just noticed the settings button where you can pick the international locations, it wasn't obvious to me before.
Whichever page I choose, http://theatrebuddies.us it is taking between 2 and 4 seconds to load, which doesn't seem great?
I am not sure if this is a hosting issue or something to do with javascript on the page which affects load time, it's very hard to say.
I wonder if anyone can recommend a Web host with the fastest possible shared hosting, if that has anything to do with it and I could set up a plan and load one page and do a comparison.
Many thanks again.
- Mark
-
With most of these you can't Mark. You can set a different country on Pingdom, but that is about as much flexibility that you get.
-Andy
-
Hi Andy,
How can I test page load speed if when using the tool above, it does not recognise where I am? It seem to think I am in a different location globally each time I try.
Thanks so much,
Mark
-
P.S. All 148 of my sites are hosted in the US. I guess the reason I am asking is that it has been hideously time-consuming setting up all these sites that to break them up into all sorts of locally-based hosting plans would take me weeks of fiddling, down-time etc. which I've already gone though earlier this year. I moved things via CloudFlare because some sites were hacked so it sent me down a wormhole of trying to learn Web security and put best practices in place. So it's not like I have one site to move somewhere ... any answer may have huge implications in terms of the effort required to put best practices in place for all my sites. Many thanks again!
-
Hi Josh,
Thank you very much for your kind assistance! Makes sense.
I posted a reply to another response above, where I guess I fleshed out my concerns perhaps a bit better (sorry it's a very confusing thing for me to sort out here). I would be very interested and grateful to hear your comments on it.
Have a great day.
Mark -
Hi Andy,
Thanks so much for that.It is really hard for me to tell what the user's experience is since I am in Australia and users are in 7 other countries and I am not sure how to determine the UX of a person in another city.
To me it seems the sites are serving fast enough even for me here; but since the Web is so hyper-competitive, I am just trying to fine tune in every conceivable area as much as possible, with the belief that lots of little things added up is a good thing, even if they are not the top 3 determining factors of ranking but still important.
In some cases, certain sites only allow users to join if they are within a particular city so the site is totally city-specific. In this case it may make sense to not use CloudFlare but just buy hosting within that city with that city's IP address. Would that be true? It seems to me that a site for people in a certain city only would get better rankings if it's server's IP address was within the same city?
CloudFlare does have a server in this city as well.I have experienced seeing some subdomains serving so slowly through CloudFare that a warning page comes up that it could not be served (page fail) ... yet with CF suppressed, the pages serve fine, so this is a concern, but maybe it was a random instance I'm not really sure.
Thing is, because of the protection of CloudFlare it feels better to have it in place(?)
My main concern is also centred around the idea that if content is cached and distributed over dozens of servers on a CDN ... and we do a "Who's hosting" the domain and it says 'CloudFlare' then for SEO purposes in terms of serving the most relevant content to people in their local area, then how does the IP address of the hosting affect ranking within a local area? In other words, if some content is cached (e.g. images) and served via CF and the rest of the content is HTML and not cached and served from the origin server ... in effect, 'where is the home of the site' i.e. if the site is hosted in the UK because most of its customer base is in the UK (but also in other countries) then how do rankings for keywords work in the UK compared to other countries? I would think without CF the site would appear more UK-specific and UK-centric; but with CF in place ... the context of the hosting is totally lost / confused?
Many thanks for your assistance.
Best regards,
Mark -
Hi Mark,
First of all, have you tested your sites to see how they are in terms of speed? I would suggest checking with...
My own personal experience is that it can cause real issues in terms of page load times - to the point I have had clients drop it altogether. Out side of that, I can't advise on the best way to utilise it.
Are you finding that your experience is a good or bad one so far?
-Andy
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
-
Best domain setup for network of locations
Hi there! I am looking for some industry expert weigh-in on best practices to how to best approach the business scenario described below to bring in some outside confirmation of our approach for a client. Tim runs a business,timsbusinesswebsite.com. Tim's business has between 15 and 30 individual locations in large cities across the United States. Unfortunately, the approach to each individual location's digital marketing has been inconsistent. Some have a unique URL for their location (e.g.timsbusinesswebsite.com/new-york-city/) Some have a subdomain (e.g.chicago.timsbusinesswebsite.com) Some have a separate domain altogether (e.g.timsbusinesswebsiitelosangeles.com) Which of these three approaches would best build the best foundation for the business in local and national rankings from an SEO standpoint and why?
Local Website Optimization | | searchcityusa0 -
Service Location links in footer and on the service page - spamming or good practice?
We are are a managed IT services business so we try and target people searching for IT support in a number of key areas. We have created individual location pages (11) to localise our service in these specific areas. We put these location links in the footer which went to the specified IT support pages respectively. Now we have created a general 'managed IT services' page and are thinking of linking to these specific pages on there as well as it makes sense to do it. Would having these 11 links in the footer as well as on the 'managed IT services' page be spamming? or would it be good practice? If this is spamming, which linking location should hold preference. Would appreciate the feedback
Local Website Optimization | | AndyL93
Thanks
Andy0 -
How many SEO clients do you handle?
I work in a small web & design agency who started offering SEO 2 yrs ago as it made sense due to them building websites. There have been 2 previous people to me and I now work there 3 days a week and they also have a junior who knew nothing before she started working for us. She mainly works for me. My question is, how many clients do you think would be reasonable to work on? We currently have around 55 and I have been working there for nearly 5 months now and haven't even got to half of the sites to do some work on. I've told them the client list is way too big and we should only have around 15 clients max. However they don't want to lose the money from the already paying clients so won't get rid of any and keep adding new ones Their systems were a mess and had no reporting or useful software so I had to investiagte and deploy that, along with project management software. Their analytics is also a mess and have employed a contractor to help sort that out too. It's like they were offering SEO services but had no idea or structure to what they did. Meta descriptions were cherry picked which ones to be done, so say 50/60 on a site not filled in. So it's not like I have 45 or so well maintained accounts. They're all a mess. Then the latest 10 new ones are all new sites so All need a lot of work. I'm starting to feel incredibly overwhelmed and oppressed by it all and wanted to see what other SEO professionals thought about it. Any thoughts would be appreciated.
Local Website Optimization | | hanamck0 -
Should I mention locations in service-specific landing pages?
I'm writing new landing page copy for a client in the HVAC industry. The client has one office, but its service area includes several cities in a metropolitan area. I'm writing two types of pages: Service-specific landing pages (e.g. "Air Conditioner Repair," "Furnace Inspections") Location-specific pages (e.g. "Dallas Heating & Air Services," "Plano Heating & Air Services") My question is whether I should also include specific locations within the service-specific pages if I'm already doing the location-specific pages as well. For example, would it make sense to do a page on AC repair with title/H1 elements like "Dallas Air Conditioner Repair Service" or "Air Conditioner Repair in Plano and Dallas" in light of the fact that there will already be 10-12 location-specific pages? My preference is to NOT include location-specific stuff in the service landing pages except for maybe a passing reference to something like "...need HVAC services for your Dallas-area home" or similar. It just seems more natural that way. Thoughts?
Local Website Optimization | | Greenery1 -
Is there an SEO benefit to using tags in WordPress for my blog posts?
We have locations across the US and are trying to develop content so that we rank well for specific keywords on a local level. For instance, "long tail keyword search in state" or "long tail keyword search near 76244", etc. The goal is to develop those content pages via blogs to rank for those keywords. We are using Yoast and will be optimizing each post using that tool. My questions are: 1. Are there any benefits to adding a long list of tags to each post?
Local Website Optimization | | Smart_Start
2. If yes, do I need to limit the number of tags?
3. Do we need to block the indexing of yoast to those tags and categories for duplicate content issues? Any insight on the best way to optimize these blog posts with the use of tags or other avenues would be greatly appreciated.0 -
Passing Juice through Multiple Locations
Hey Gang, Thank you in advance for taking some time out of your day to read/comment on this. I really am thankful for this awesome community. SO, I just took over a locksmith client with over 20 different locations all up and down the west coast. They have some of their Google My Businesses ranking in the snap three. But most of them are not even close. The SEO that they had done was very 2012 and very messy. They have the name of the cities in their GMB profiles which is against google policy (although we haven't got taken down) Example: Instead of Locksmith plus they have Locksmith Plus Portland or Locksmith Plus Seattle. So their Citations are all over the place. Some locations have a bunch, and some locations I haven't even been able to put them on Yelp or Super pages (because they do not accommodate well at all for multi location business it's kind of been a nightmare) And Besides mediocre citations their websites are all over the place to. None of them are Linked to each other they each look like a separate brand. So here's my question(s) 1. I have a pretty good PBN network of my own real websites for clients that I have ranked to page one. I want to start Backlinking to just our one Main locksmith site (that ranks for no city) an have that juice flow into all the other sites but I am afraid I wont interlink them correctly and the juice will get wasted. Should I have like all the links to every cities website on the front page and point all my pbn at the front page? How to I link these bad boys correctly? Or should I... (next question) 2. Ok I know the Google my business does not care about how many citations we have but rather the quality of those citations. I already know we are having a brand crisis. We need to change all these listings to the same brand name but I am afraid google will spank us once we change and take down our number ones (so be it?) But My question is how much should I focus on back linking some of these page listings. Like should I be posting the naked Yelp URL on some of my web 2.0s (that link back to my main website)? Or what if i just had the main citations on the cities website so they could get some juice too? Confusing! Overall I know that Google wants clean consistent branding and that what we want to do.I just want to make sure everything is hooked up right so when I do make some Bad a** big content that every location can benefit from it. Guys thank you again. Much Loves and I hope every body had a great new year. Here's to a strong 2016
Local Website Optimization | | Meier0 -
Should I open a new domain and website for a new location under one company?
Hi my name is Gina and I wanted to ask for some advice. I'm thinking opening a diff location and was thinking if its a good idea to open up a new domain and new website? And why that may be a good idea and why or a bad idea and why?
Local Website Optimization | | LittleDog0 -
How to handle clients who want to target far away from their location?
In general, How do you recommend handling clients that are persistent about targeting a location that is very far away from their physical location, i.e. the client is in Providence, RI, but wants to target Boston, MA. I typically give them a discussion about how they will not rank in the 7 packs, particularly post pigeon, but wanted to know if the Moz community had any other tips since this seems to come up so frequently. Thank you!
Local Website Optimization | | Red_Spot_Interactive1