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 site drop google, not banned or penalised?
Hi all, We've been working on our site weldingmart.com for a while. 4 weeks ago we got a sudden drop from google rankings even with our own brand name. No clear cause found, and decided to walk through all technicalities of the SEO fundament. thus we did the following
Technical SEO | | jkossel
-> Setup google webmasters tools
no issues found, a few 404's, few 410's sure thats all ok,
-> Setup robots.txt to only index homepages, lister pages, content and product detail pages (disabled all filters and search queries) Also we banned russian and spammy bots for performance-sake.
-> Added sitemaps, and around 14k pages seemed to be already indexed.
-> When searching for "site:weldingmart.com" i can find 14k pages.
-> we had a low 33/100 page speed score and improved this to 76/100 So we did a lot of clean up and improved a lot of items. but still 2-weeks in. we still have no ranking improvements. Before we went down we had around 100 clicks a day from google. now 5 avg. by the way i think a main issue is the low link count of course but still googling your own name should return us in top3 right. Is there something we are missing, do we need more time. I just want to verify that we do not mis anything!1 -
Sudden drop in Rankings after 301 redirect
Greetings to Moz Community. Couple of months back, I have redirected my old blog to a new URL with 301 redirect because of spammy links pointed to my old blog. I have transfer all the posts manually, changed the permalink structure and 301 redirected every individual URL. All the ranking were boosted within couple of weeks and regained the traffic. After a month I have observed, the links pointed to old site are showing up in Webmaster Tools for the new domain. I was shocked (no previous experience) and again Disavowed all links. Today, all the positions went down for new domain. My questions are: 1. Did the Disavow tool worked this time with new domain? All the links pointed to old domain were devaluated? Is this the reason for ranking drop? Or 2. 301 Old domain with Unnatural links causes the issue? 3. Removing 301 will help to regain few keyword positions? I'm taking this as a case study. Already removed the 301 redirect. Looking for solid discussion.Thanks.
Technical SEO | | praveen4390 -
Competitor Recently Changed his Title to Match Mine
Hey Mozsters, I'm competing with one website for a niche, he's currently beating me and recently changed his Title to match mine exactly. Are there any negative repercussions from this? Should I change mine so users aren't confused? Why would someone do this?
Technical SEO | | Unturned0 -
Should I change my targeted page?
Currently I have a site where the targeted keywords were on the home page, with links built to the homepage. It has been widely recognised though that Google is looking more and more for specific content on webpages that holds greater relevance to search queries. As such, I switched this targeted page to other created webpages - changing metatags and creating more relevant content for respective keywords. I thought this would improve rankings, however, upon doing this there was a sharp fall in rankings for keywords. Is there anything that I could have done wrong, or can do better so that keywords move back up the rankings?
Technical SEO | | Gavo0 -
Changing IP adress of Website will impact on ranking or not?
Hello, We have TLDs as below:
Technical SEO | | CommercePundit
bannerbuzz.combannerbuzz.co.uk
bannerbuzz.com.au
bannerbuzz.ca Within few days, We are moving in Magento Technology for 2 domains,
Bannerbuzz.com.au and Bannerbuzz.co.uk We have purchased new plan, So IP address of those 2 domains will be changed. So my question is, It will impact on my current Ranking or not?0 -
Questionable Referral Traffic
Hey SEOMozers, I'm working with a client that has a suspicious traffic pattern going on. In October, a referral domain called profitclicking.com started passing visits to the site. Almost, in parallel the overall visits decreased anywhere from 35 to 50%. After checking out profitclicking.com more, it promises more traffic "with no SEO knowledge". The client doesn't think that this service was signed up for internally. Regardless, it obviously smells pretty fishy, and I'm searching for a way I can disallow traffic from this site. Could I simply just write a simple disallow statement in the robots.txt and be done with it? Just wanted to see if anyone else had any other ideas before recommending a solution. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | kylehungate0 -
Can backlinks from advertising cause a traffic drop?
Hi, I recently noticed that our organic traffic has started to drop and maybe coincidently our adwords traffic has increased. I was asked to investigate the drop. I know that from the google update that unnatural backlinks would be penalized so I thought it might be the backlinks from a site that we advertise on because of the sheer number we have required from them in the last month. Would you think that would be the cause? if not, what could it be? and if it is, how do I go about correcting it as fast as possible? Any Help with this would be greatly appreciated. Many Thanks, Colin
Technical SEO | | digital.moretogether.com0 -
Changing a blog url from subdomain to subfolder
I am abou to change my company blog from a subdomain (blog.mydomain.com) to a subfolder (mydomain.com/blog), from suggestions from this awesome community! Not only that though, because the current blog is on another server than the main site I have to move my blog between servers as well. This will be a big hassle for me, and means a big risk for errors as I don't have a clue what I am doing on the development part. Hint: I'm no developer. My blog is fairly new, having posted 18 blog posts so far. There is no major linking to or from the blog as it has been basically no activity on the blog. It has been fairly good optimized for SEO, with custom plugin settings for Wordpress SEO plugin and similar. Also followed advice from Rand regarding wordpress SEO. So I guess my question is: Would it be a big loss for me to just start over with a new blog on the subfolder domain? And move content over from the old blog manually (and then deleting the old one). Or would It be plain stupid taking that route? Thankfull for all help I can get!
Technical SEO | | danielpett0