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Fan of what exactly? I thought they were great and had them in front of all my sites.. til I tested the SEO impact and removed it from every single site. The

by lugged 5y ago

Fan of what exactly? I thought they were great and had them in front of all my sites.. til I tested the SEO impact and removed it from every single site. The perf enhancement was minimal at best, the added costs and complexity overhead simply wasn't worth it. Tried their DNS too, 8.8.8.8 was faster for my network.

schnebbau 5y ago
If you don't set up the caching correctly then loading will be slightly slower. If you do, then it will be noticeably faster. Anecdotal of course, but the performance boost lead to an easy SEO jump for our sites.
brian_herman 5y ago
8.8.8.8 is google do you mean 1.1.1.1?
- croes 5y ago
  He said Google's DNS is faster.
jessaustin 5y ago
...til I tested the SEO impact... Any speculation on what could cause this? Do search engines prefer some IP ranges?
cryptonym 5y ago
I you don't leverage performance related features of a CDN (mostly cache), it's more a security layer. It won't improve performance until you get your hands dirty or ask a professional to tune it for you (and maybe you did). A global DNS resolver may decrease performance, for instance it can give poor results on DNS based load balancers. Interested to know how you assess SEO impact and your findings.
atonse 5y ago
What's the SEO impact with CloudFlare? Isn't that a potential massive conflict of interest if Google is reducing the SEO ranking of sites hosted on their competitors' platforms? If so, yet again, I can't wait for the US DOJ and FTC to just rain hell on these people.
- judge2020 5y ago
  Maybe at some point there were crawlers that assigned spam reputation on a per-IP basis, but so much of the internet these days goes through Cloudflare and other CDNs with shared IP ranges that it would be insane to keep this practice up.
  - lugged 5y ago
    Maybe 2-3 years ago. Pretty sure it was IP based. CF drops you on a shared IP, its hit and miss of you end up on an IP next to a bunch of dodgy sites or not, do a reverse IP lookup to find out what else is running on your IP. > It would be insane to keep this practice up. What's the alternative? Oh yea, did CF ever fix the domain hijacking issue for deleted sites?
judge2020 5y ago
The SEO impact is negligible at best unless you have it set up to specifically block crawlers (or you just forget about crawlers when configuring rules).
1123581321 5y ago
Your experience is a bit unusual. We saw measurable improvement from edge caching. Argo routing gave us about 200ms back on TTFB where we thought it was worthwhile. We could of course set up our own edge caching with another provider (we also use Cloudfront a lot), but that doesn’t make Cloudflare bad for providing the same service. Similarly, Cloudflare isn’t bad if they provide a fast DNS alternative to Google’s fast DNS—and the mix of features isn’t identical.

by lugged 5y ago

schnebbau 5y ago

If you don't set up the caching correctly then loading will be slightly slower. If you do, then it will be noticeably faster. Anecdotal of course, but the performance boost lead to an easy SEO jump for our sites.

brian_herman 5y ago

8.8.8.8 is google do you mean 1.1.1.1?

croes 5y ago
He said Google's DNS is faster.

jessaustin 5y ago

...til I tested the SEO impact... Any speculation on what could cause this? Do search engines prefer some IP ranges?

cryptonym 5y ago

I you don't leverage performance related features of a CDN (mostly cache), it's more a security layer. It won't improve performance until you get your hands dirty or ask a professional to tune it for you (and maybe you did). A global DNS resolver may decrease performance, for instance it can give poor results on DNS based load balancers. Interested to know how you assess SEO impact and your findings.

atonse 5y ago

What's the SEO impact with CloudFlare? Isn't that a potential massive conflict of interest if Google is reducing the SEO ranking of sites hosted on their competitors' platforms? If so, yet again, I can't wait for the US DOJ and FTC to just rain hell on these people.

judge2020 5y ago
Maybe at some point there were crawlers that assigned spam reputation on a per-IP basis, but so much of the internet these days goes through Cloudflare and other CDNs with shared IP ranges that it would be insane to keep this practice up.
- lugged 5y ago
  Maybe 2-3 years ago. Pretty sure it was IP based. CF drops you on a shared IP, its hit and miss of you end up on an IP next to a bunch of dodgy sites or not, do a reverse IP lookup to find out what else is running on your IP. > It would be insane to keep this practice up. What's the alternative? Oh yea, did CF ever fix the domain hijacking issue for deleted sites?

judge2020 5y ago

The SEO impact is negligible at best unless you have it set up to specifically block crawlers (or you just forget about crawlers when configuring rules).

1123581321 5y ago

Your experience is a bit unusual. We saw measurable improvement from edge caching. Argo routing gave us about 200ms back on TTFB where we thought it was worthwhile. We could of course set up our own edge caching with another provider (we also use Cloudfront a lot), but that doesn’t make Cloudflare bad for providing the same service. Similarly, Cloudflare isn’t bad if they provide a fast DNS alternative to Google’s fast DNS—and the mix of features isn’t identical.