Moved servers, added CloudFlare. Instant drop in SEO. (Pictures).

Dear DP,

I decided to register after lurking around a while as I found many topics that could directly help me withohut the need for an account. The community is amazing.

Alright, so almost 2 weeks ago, I decided to move my website to a dedicated server, amazing specs and location, because of its' (luckily) immense growth, our VPS kept crashing at around 2000 online visitors (Source: Google Analytics). We added CloudFlare to the new server as we moved our website there. We let it be for about 10 days, until I realized that it just couldn't be.

Our websites search engine impressions reduced by aroudn 90% (first time we ever were reduced) and it is impossible to be a coincidence, as it happened right after moving servers and adding CloudFlare. Performing a Google search we immediately found a small group of other people who reported the same issue.

Please find our drop in the image:

We haven't changed anything in our SEO that could affect the rankings in this manner. Our daily visits went back from 100K to a mere 60K. Imagine the effect on our AdSense earnings. We will post another image, after two weeks, to review the results without CloudFlare. It is impossible, that the server is the reason, as the server is a RAID10 with 1 GB up-link and trust me, standing against the VPS we had earlier this is a huge overkill for our advanced custom ultra light weight CMS. The server is located optimally and our visitors worldwide have let us know that the site loads at least five times quicker at peak hours, also GTMetrix and PageSpeed have shown similar results.

I would very much like to hear about your experience with CloudFlare and whether you think it could be something else than CloudFlare.

Thanks for reading anyway!

Regards!

 

We should not impact your SEO negatively at all. Did you have any crawl errors or anything in Webmaster Tools?

 

Since we removed CloudFlare we are seeing recovery in visitors according to Google Analytics, also our ranking in the search engines of Google is recovering. The Google Webmasters Tool however always runs a few days late to see search statistics, I will post a screenshot once that is updated.

We had no crawl errors, neither connectivity issues, neither DNS problems, neither page problems:

 

Hard to look at here (would have preferred a ticket to us when you noticed a possible problem). Were you only seeing issues in Google Analytics, or did you see the same behavior directly on your server and CloudFlare stats?

 

Currently the only possible suspicion we have on the matter is that the nameservers CloudFlare provided us with, were according to Google Safe Browsing crowded with sites that spread malware, viruses amongst other harmful content. We think Google might have penalized us at that point recorded.

To get back to your question, please note that we are not amateurs and we have thoroughly checked all stats files, this includes DoubleClick/DFP impressions/revenue recorded and the basic statistics insights amongst other larger corporate platforms.

You clearly already see a drop in Google Search impressions and clicks in the first picture, it is only logical that except for direct traffic, our total traffic would reduce.

Almost the second day after removal of CloudFlare, as Google likes to crawl our pages a lot, we are back up on most first pages on Google and as I said earlier our traffic is seeing a significant increase according to Google Analytics, our DoubleClick/DFP impressions and basic statistic software.

We appreciate that you would like to help us out here, even though it is less convenient for you, thanks for that.

 

I think it's a total coincidence. You can find similar occurrences happening all over the web. People think that the drop in traffic is related to them moving their sites, etc., when all along Google is simply tweaking with their algorithm and the people are getting hit with the penguin and hummingbird updates.

After some time the crawler went back and re-instated your site's positioning. I personally think it's that simple.

I wouldn't worry much about this whole issue. Updates come, updates go... a good service will remain forever.

 

I like how you refute tupacs quote, however we are confident that this is not a Google update hit. It is actual a confirmation that the day after we removed CloudFlare the traffic went back up day-by-day, and we are now almost at the level of before removal. Today we are estimating to receive over 80K visits again from what the statistics recorded until now for today. As soon as webmasters tools is updated sufficiently, we will post another graphic. We expect this to be in as much time as we used CloudFlare to reflect accurate results. Three days have past now, whereas we had CloudFlare active before that for twelve days.

We truely believe it has to do with the nameservers CloudFlare assigns you with, since there are in fact many websites using their service flawlessly, we admit that. We think it has to do with the fact that the nameservers that were assigned to us, were primarily used by websites spreading harmful content, as Google's Safebrowsing reported.

We'll post the graphic from Webmasters Tools next week.

 

I also saw a drop in SERP's and lower page download/crawling speeds, after using cloudflare about a few years ago. I haven't used it since then. Mine was the free version. They were offering some paid options too.

 

Result after dropping CloudFlare for 3 weeks. We are back on original track and growing again.

 

So it seems like your suspicions were right. I am surprised that it's crowded with sites that spread malware. Was their downtime excessive or just normal?

Glad you're recovering nicely.

 

Yes, according to Google's safe browsing reports that their IPs are crowded with harmful websites. Actually, our website loaded a little quicker (more synced up) and had no downtime. It was only our SERPs that were hit hard, very hard.

We are glad that we have recovered and head for growth again.

EDIT:
Also to get back to your previous message, we don't believe Google did a significant update during our period of hit, they did one more than a week before that, however it only affected our results more positively. So we truely do believe that CF has correlation with your SERPs and Google's willingness to crawl your websites.

 

alot of spammers are using CloudFlare to get different ip and hide their identity
so i am not surprised at all

if it is not necessary it is not a good practice to move CloudFlare

 

Hi awtv,

Sorry I missed the other updates to this thread (notifications went into my spam filter for some reason...added to my contact list now).

We have literally over a million websites using us and no recent issues we have seen at all similar to what you are reporting. We're really more than happy to look at this in an actual support ticket, but there's very little I can look at just by looking at the screen shot you have posted.

"We think it has to do with the fact that the nameservers that were assigned to us, were primarily used by websites spreading harmful content, as Google's Safebrowsing reported."

This probably isn't the issue. Every domain that is on those nameservers would then have an issue & the safe browsing diagnostics from Google are actually very domain specific (yoursite.com has malware).

 

In fact,
Considering that websites that use Cloudflare share the same A record. (The same proxy IP), Google can penalize all the website that use the same IP, if there is a significant number of spammy websites on that IP.

 

What actions have you taken to fix soft errors and not found errors? Fixing such errors will also help you boost the traffic like it was before. Moving to a different server is always a headache. You see drops in traffic and that is normal, once you fix all the errors, the site gets back to normal stage after few days/weeks time.