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Ask HN: Did Cloudflare Destroy My SEO Traffic?

10 points by jorgecurio ↗ HN
I am extremely upset but I have come to the conclusion that after using cloudflare pro, my SEO traffic has disappeared. I checked to find that I didn't even show up in the search results for my own full domain name.

Prior to using cloudflare I did not have this problem. SEO traffic was good, I was seeing my site in the search results.

I am just at a loss for what to do. As much as I loved cloudflare paying $20/month for SSL, I now have growing suspicion that it was destroying my SEO traffic all this time and it actually leaves me infuriated.

How can I configure cloudflare or should I leave cloudflare altogether?

11 comments

[ 1484 ms ] story [ 1992 ms ] thread
jgrahamc
I checked to find that I didn't even show up in the search results for my own full domain name

What is your domain name?

jorgecurio
is there an email address I can reach you at?
jgrahamc
I suggest you contact CloudFlare support to help you with this.
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colept
My personal experience with CloudFlare is that it is best configured as a CDN for your public static front-end. Any CSS, JS, and images will see bandwidth reductions.

That being said, for the back-end I've never seen improvements. If CloudFlare detects a server error, it could show a static optimized page which is great for anti-DDoS protection but the recovery on their end was significantly slower (minutes behind). It's an unnecessary layer in the protocol.

dangrossman
Log in to Google Webmaster Tools, claim your site, and find out why it's not being indexed. Understand the problem before attempting to remedy it.
iurisilvio
I don't think so.

I'm using Cloudflare as a CDN for my website for 3 months now. All my traffic (~98%) is from Google and it is consistently increasing every week.

It saves 20% of my bandwidth serving static resources and some of most visited pages.

I don't use SSL, it is not important for my pages.

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jorgecurio
Guys it's been resolved.

I had <meta name='robots' content='noindex,nofollow' /> in my homepage.