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Comment by lugged | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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).

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

...til I tested the SEO impact...

Any speculation on what could cause this? Do search engines prefer some IP ranges?

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.

8.8.8.8 is google do you mean 1.1.1.1?

He said Google's DNS is faster.

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