I was facing significant bot traffic (about 150 fake visits a day), so I decided to add Cloudflare to combat the bots and fake traffic. However, three days after implementation, more than 70% of my pages were unindexed by Google. I’m unsure if this is due to Cloudflare, or if the timing was just coincidental.
I considered the possibility of a new Google core update causing the unindexing, but my site is pure and clean, adhering strictly to Google’s policies, and I’m still searching for a solution.
Regarding Cloudflare, I hadn’t thought it might be an issue (and I’m still not sure it is) because I’m aware that Cloudflare has a allowlist for Googlebot, Bing bot, etc.
I’m uncertain if Google is indexing with a proxy IP or something that Cloudflare doesn’t recognize. I don’t want to misleadingly point to Cloudflare as the problem since it might be a coincidental timing issue, but I’m trying to find a solution regardless of the cause.
Google Search Console showed many Server error (5xx) messages and numerous “crawled but not indexed” errors. I requested reindexing, and some pages were reindexed (about 80–120 pages), but others failed. I resubmitted them, and now the status is ‘Pending’.
I’m wondering if I should stop ‘Bot Fight Mode’ in Cloudflare. Is it possible that this issue is caused by Cloudflare, and what should I do to resolve it, or might this not be an issue at all.
I’m wondering if I should stop ‘Bot Fight Mode’ in Cloudflare. Is it possible that this issue is caused by Cloudflare, and what should I do to resolve it, or might this not be an issue at all