Huge drop in rankins, traffic and impressions after changing to CloudFlare

[H.M.N.]

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?

[WebMarkets]

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?

[effectdigital]

Trying a Reverse-IP lookup via domain may also help the OP to assess any potential threat(s) in that area

[TimHolmes]

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