It seems to have become all the rage for SEO's to use CloudFlare in hopes that “better performance” will lead to better rankings. We tested- you get to see the answer.
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Does Using CloudFlare Boost Your Rankings?
This was run by Carin Handsun who did a really nice job with it. The idea is that you do some work on CloudFlare and you hear that it is a ranking factor. It is kind of like switching to https. CloudFlare is a CDN or content distribution network.
The basic concept is, your site is sitting in a server in Dallas. Somebody is coming at it from Paris. They have to travel all the way to Dallas to access your information. When you use a CDN, what they do is they put your site on servers closer to where the person is searching from. The person in Paris gets a server closer to Paris, a person in New York city gets it in New York city, in San Francisco its in San Francisco.
When they are closer to the server, they get great response time. It is a speed issue but it is also a security issue. For example, someone from Serbia decides to try and take down your site, what they end up doing is they take down the Serbian server version and the rest of your sites are up.
Overall, it’s not a bad thing to do. Is it a good thing for SEO, in the sense that if you just switch over your pages to CloudFlare, are you going to get a ranking boost? Is it a ranking factor?
For security and the decent thing to do, and it’s cheap too - I think CloudFlare is under $10 a month. It’s cheap especially for security. Especially if you have people coming at you from a lot of different places or if you have a subject matter that certain people might find objectionable, where you have hacking groups coming at you. It’s not a bad idea.
Is it a ranking factor? The bottom line is, no – in it of itself, it is not a ranking factor. We weren’t seeing it as a ranking factor. The site that was switched over to CloudFlare didn’t move in rankings.
Site speed in itself is not a ranking factor, what you would want to look at is TTFB time – Time to First Bite – it is possible that CDN would be a better option for that especially if you have people coming from other parts of the world to your site, that could be a factor for you and you might rank better in Google France, if you will. Those are the things I would consider.
I haven’t tested CloudFlare for that and I have a feeling that, because we didn’t see any significant movement, it is really not doing much for that. It might also be something that you should ask your developer because they might have something better to be able to check for that or they might have the ability in CloudFlare to tweak it easier than, say, on your host. Those things, I would look at but in it of itself, it is not a ranking factor.