Hi, I’ve been investigating for months the strange reason why I lost so much organic access.
So far I haven’t found anything, there are no penalties in webmaster tools, and I’ve always respected all the guidelines for healthy SEO and the most important pages on my site are all approved on pagespeed insights:
Reviewing my Cloudflare settings I had Crawler Hints turned on for a long time I can’t even remember.
now I turned it off to see if it makes any difference. I’m posting this to ask if anyone else has noticed about issues after activating Crawler Hints
PS: I’m still not blaming Crawler Hints. I just want to exchange experiences to see if anyone else suspected this.
I also remembered the Bot Fight Mode. I use the following configuration. As my site is over 10 years old, I suffer a lot from automated bots, so I chose to block it. But I’m worried that Cloudflare might be blocking legitimate Google bots, for example.
No worries I actually gave up a long time ago philosophising about what could cause what at Google’s Ranking etc.
Yes, Cloudflare technically can influence it, but if you want to have a definite answer to “why this happened” then this actually is the wrong place and I don’t even know if there is a proper right place as Google does not have a good support and people over there are not transparent. And in some situations you just want to talk to some people/humans about why and what - not really possible with Google.
The good thing: you can clearly see when your site started going down. Think back what you did there, or some days prior. Maybe also check the Cloudflare-Log to find what settings have been changed.
I am not aware of any negative effects of Crawler Hints, but that does not mean there are none.
I agree with you about Google. Really, I’ve tried countless times to get some support about what’s wrong with my site. In addition to always respecting and following Google’s SEO guidelines, I’ve also reached out to competing sites that aren’t getting demoted, and my SEO strategy follows those guidelines even better than competitors.
The people at Google are completely insensitive, as people depend on the positioning of their sites in organic search to survive. So, I see everything going down the drain and my income almost zero, with no one to guide me.
thanks for trying to help me. I will temporarily disable Bot Fight Management and Crawler Hints and track stats.
I actually gave up a long time ago philosophising about what could cause what at Google’s Ranking etc.