IP Bad Neighborhood, Cloudflare and beyond

[Kira]

Last 3 months I've launched a lot of new websites, 100% are inside the sandfuckingbox.

When doing competition research in this new niche I'm working, I've seen a lot of sites ranking really well without links, without on page seo, lot's of keyword cannibalization.

One competitor specifically is crushing everything with a really bad onpage SEO and duplicated content. Yes, this is a new site that's copying content and ranking very well.

No, it's not cross domain canonical, it's not hidden PBN links, they do not know what SEO is.

I got insomnia stalking this domain for more than 3 weeks. Rankings increasing day after day. In less than 3 months he got the second place for more estimated traffic for the niche, losing for just one domain.

More than the SAME ecommerce CMS (VTEX, Brazillian top 1 ecomm software), they are in the same IP. They are not the same brand, but as the plataform is the same, they share the same ip.

For a while, I've think that could be just as @Ryuzaki said here, but the results are tremendous.

Reversing the IP check, I've found a lot of high authority domains hosted in the same IP.

HYPOTHESIS

Not just bad neighborhood affects negativelly websites, but good neighborhoods can give a boost for new websites.

I started googling everything about it. Found lot's of content saying, for example, that cloudflare could impact ranks negativelly even if the speed goes up using it.

I've changed all my new websites to letsencrypt and turned off the cloudflare, let's see the results next weeks.

Additional reading

https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/cloudflare-has-an-impact-on-seo.1123437/ (go to page 5 and see recent discussion)
https://serverguy.com/case-study/cloudflare-seo/
https://www.rebootonline.com/blog/long-term-shared-hosting-experiment/
https://www.warriorforum.com/search-engine-optimization/1039346-cloudflare-seo-problems.html

Most websites can run well on cloudflare, but when you create a new account, you can get some blessed ip neighborhood or a really bad neighborhood.

I think it will affect more recent websites than older strong domains. My hypothesis is that sandbox is longer on shared hosts or cloudflare. I know cloudflare is about 50% of web bla bla bla, it can help on page speed, but at the end of the day, we want to rank faster and it test it makes sense for me.

What you say about it? Thanks!

 

[secretagentdad]

Go look into majestic seos content on this stuff.

They’ve got some fully fleshed out maps and tools you can use to just win and skip having to figure it all out.

 

[Kira]

I can't find anything about it.

I've just got information about bad class C IPs that links to sites, tiers, etc. In this thread I'm talking about IP Neighborhood of the site itself...

 

[Ryuzaki]

I like the theory but at the same time a lot of things that contradict it are popping into my mind.

Shared Hosting Success​

Like, pretty much anyone using shared hosting would be screwed. Every shared IP and DNS has spam, adult, pharma, and whatever on every single server. Lots of it, too. Yet we've all ran successful projects on shared servers. I went full time building on cheap shared servers.

Free DDOS Mitigation is Super Slow​

I think the main problem people experience with Cloudflare is they think of it as a CDN, when really it's mainly a DDOS protection service. The CDN side of it tends to be slower than rolling without it. It's the DDOS part that all the free users (which is most SEO's) are only getting the service for free because they're collecting data for Cloudflare.

I'm sure you've all seen that interstitial page when you reach a website and it's like "Please wait 5 seconds as we check your IP address." That's not just protecting the Cloudflare user from DDOS. That's them collecting data on you as the website user. Paid Cloudflare users never have to show this "IP and browser data fingerprint harvesting" screen to their users.

How many people stick around for that 5 seconds? If you click on a site from Google and it tells you to wait 5 seconds, you're probably going to press back immediately. That kind of Pogosticking can be hard to overcome in the SERPs where Google is trying to keep a high CTR for user satisfaction.

I'm assuming Cloudflare doesn't show this to googlebot or their speed tester bots, etc... but maybe they do? Maybe Google cloaks their "in the wild" speed test spiders as regular users. Welcome to having the worst page speed score in history if 5 seconds goes by before anything stable happens.

 

[Kira]

Yes, @Ryuzaki , there are a lot of pros and cons, just tests will show us the truth.

First results, 10 days of cloudflare removed:

No any other changes. Just cloudflare to direct AWS server (and letsencrypt set up).

No movimentation on other sites yet.