Can a cloud based firewall affect my search ranking?

[BearPaw88]

Hi,

I recently implemented a firewall on my website to prevent hacking attacks. We were getting a crazy amount of people per day trying to brute force our website. I used the sucuri cloud proxy firewall service which they claim because of the super fast caching actually helps SEO. I was just wondering is this true? Because we're slowly falling further and further down the SERPS and i really don't know why. If not, is there any major google update recently I don't know about?

Thanks,

Robert

[Toddfoster]

The only thing I can think of is if you are located in the UK. It might of affected your rankings if the firewall uses US Data centres?

If this is your site: http://bearsbys.com/

You are using a .com domain for a UK website so having your IP change to US could mess things up a little. The first thing I would do is go to Google Webmaster Tools and make sure you have set your Location to the United Kingdom.

Check to see if your site is hosted on a UK Hosting provider. Then check and see if Sucuri only uses US Data Centres.

[BearPaw88]

I don't think so.. that's what the whole rebuild was for was to mainly to improve all of the content and the design of the site... i'm not sure what it is but it's massively affected me

[JordanLowry]

With them there is no telling. Maybe a quality update? Who knows.

[BearPaw88]

Hey thanks so much for getting back to me, according to the link you sent google did a core algorithm update in January which actually sounds about right. We put a brand new site up at the beginning of Feb so i think we might've got some false placement for a while and now it's settled back into it and we're losing traction. I wonder what they've done that's changed so much. hmmm..

[JordanLowry]

Hey,

I cant speak on whether or not the firewall offers any seo benefits but I would imagine it would especially if it is caching faster. However Moz has compiled a listing of algorithm updates. I would look at when your rankings started to fall and see if it matches up with the updates and check your backlink profile and do some competitor research to see if anyone is doing anything different.

I hope that helps some.