I don’t think that it has any negative SEO effects, in fact I’ve heard that it can actually help you. I find it something useful to ad if you can afford it. Thanks for making the thread, and best of luck.
Well Google Robots will still load the site very fast so it will not have a positive impact on SEO but it can help visitors to load faster and engagement can increase.
I guess we have to see which is more important. Speed or uptime for SEO. I think uptime is more important, speed is also a good factor, but uptime does weighs for search engines far more than speed, depending is very very slow 
In either case I still use CloudFlare, it’s great and the tools it comes with are unbeatable! Let’s just hope they get less downtime. I have witnesses a few websites with this error message on and it’s not pretty.
Hi,
There are two real causes of the site offline message:
- The server is actually having issues for the site.
- Something is blocking requests from our IPs at the host or server level. Site owners should make sure that they don’t have server rules (.htacess, firewall, etc.) blocking requests from our IPs. Troubleshooting site offline issues.
CloudFlare actually starts at free (we do have optional paid plans for sites that need more advanced features).
Great question and even better answer. I’ve just been reading through your blog post which was very very helpful
Google tells us : “Outages that are not clearly marked as such can negatively affect a site’s reputation.”
This does not imply short-term and/or temporary issues as Website Reputation is a consistent factor and re-accruing, and unannounced, down-times will impact it in a very real, negative and long-term way.
Also, as with all SEO related factors, this is something that cannot be accurately gauged because the damage occurs not only for existing rankings but also for future ranking potential.
For example: Even if, “in spite” of all the down-times, your organic traffic totals are not changed this does not mean “Zero-Damadge” because you still need to consider all of the progress that could have happened but didn’t, due to this issue.
(i.e. even when you see a 5% you still may be missing on 10% growth and etc…)
I`m stating this to explain why:
A.) There is no real room for individual speculation about the effects of this, or any other, SEO factor (there are some independent statistical studies one can semi-rely on, but none that focuses on the down-time issue)
B.) If Google says that something is “bad” for you - you should listen carefully and read into every word, because nothing in such announcement is unintentional and the wording is VERY carefully chosen.
So, when they say “reputation” they mean “reputation” (as in something that follows you around for a long while).
If they wanted to talk about “short-term” they would have done so too.
<snip/>
Enjoy
Here’s the snippet from your article:
“Once in a while we get asked whether a site’s visibility in Google’s search results can be impacted in a negative way if it’s unavailable when Googlebot tries to crawl it. Sometimes downtime is unavoidable: a webmaster might decide to take a site down due to ongoing site maintenance, or legal or cultural requirements. Outages that are not clearly marked as such can negatively affect a site’s reputation. While we cannot guarantee any crawling, indexing or ranking, there are methods to deal with planned website downtime in a way that will generally not negatively affect your site’s visibility in the search results.”
Please show where it states that it is a long-term issue.
Matt Cutts, a Google employee, and Vanessa Fox, a former Google employee, have said the following regarding Google indexing and downtime:
“Googlebot will try a few times before the pages drop from the index.” – Vanessa Fox
“As for how long it takes for a page to get back in once the site is back up, that really depends on a number of factors, such as how often the site is crawled in general.” – Vanessa Fox
If the host is down when Googlebot tries to access your pages, then those pages may disappear from the index until Googlebot can crawl them again. In webmaster tools, do the pages you want indexed appear in the crawl errors section? If so, then Googlebot was unable to access them.
If you are moving the site to a new host and the pages are available the next time Googlebot tries to access them, then you should see them in the index again soon after that.
"Googlebot will try a few times before the pages drop from the index.
As for how long it takes for a page to get back in once the site is
back up, that really depends on a number of factors, such as how often
the site is crawled in general.
Googlebot can’t know if or when a page will return when it gets an
error response (whether that’s a network down, 404, or other error)
and since our primary aim is to have quality search results for users,
we don’t want to keep pages that return these types of errors in our
index. The best way of handling these situations, therefore, is to
remove the pages, but continue to try to access them, then return them
to the index once we get a valid server response."
I have heard most users rave about the improvements that Cloudflare has brought to their sites. Overall there will always be some factor that brings you down on some front. You have to decide which systems of checks and balances best benefits you overall.
i have joined days ago CloudFlare.
but, i have experience decent traffic drop.
i can’t find any solution.
so, i have to turn off CloudFlare.
you can see picture here.
<snip pictures removed as requested>
What is the second service you’re using to measure traffic? The CloudFlare analytics look ok to me.
You can have issues with reporting if you’re using a service that requires original visitor IP and you don’t have something like mod_cloudflare installed.
sorry, admin remove my posting link.
that picture is google webmaster tools - traffic.
thank you.
Google Analytics?
no. it is google webmaster tool.
my link, picture was removed from this forum.
i don’t know what is violation site policy.
so, i can’t post here.
if you interested in my case.
i will share my log gladly.
i will send private message for you. send me reply.
thank you.
here is CF,google webmaster statics.
I’ve been using CloudFlares services for over a year now, I havn’t noticed much difference in page loading times on my end (though i have had feedback from people in the US that the site loads slowly) but I have noticed a ton of bandwidth being saved from malicious bots and machines trying to access my site.
Cloudflare is best service to protect our site from ddos attackers and spammers. I’ve started using this service after being attacked by some of my competitors.
Thanks everyone, I’m sure the OP received the answer long ago.
Thread Closed.