What is the name of the domain?
What is the error number?
Google Indexing Delay After Enabling Cloudflare Features
What is the error message?
Google Indexing Delay After Enabling Cloudflare Features
What is the issue you’re encountering
Google Indexing Delay After Enabling Cloudflare Features
What steps have you taken to resolve the issue?
looking to find the issue
What are the steps to reproduce the issue?
Hi everyone,
Over the last 3 days, I’ve been experiencing a significant issue with Google indexing on my news website. Previously, our articles would get indexed within 2–6 minutes of publishing, which is critical for a news-focused platform. However, recently indexing has been taking several hours — sometimes up to 10 hours — which is severely affecting our visibility and performance.
The timing of the issue coincides with enabling two specific Cloudflare features:
- Tiered Cache (Smart Tiered Caching Topology)
- Rocket Loader™
These were the only changes made to our configuration before the indexing delay began.
Interestingly, via our server log access files, we can confirm that Googlebot is accessing the articles correctly within minutes of publication — just as it used to. This suggests that the bot is reaching the site, but for some reason, the content isn’t being indexed promptly as before.
My question is:
Could these Cloudflare features be affecting how Google interprets the content, possibly delaying indexing even though the pages are being crawled?
I’m particularly curious if Rocket Loader’s script handling or Tiered Caching’s delivery layer could be interfering with how Google perceives or processes the page.
Has anyone experienced something similar after enabling these features? Any suggestions on troubleshooting this further or configuring Cloudflare to avoid SEO-related issues would be very appreciated.
Thanks in advance for your help!