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Hello,
I couldn't find any recent discussions around this topic.

We recently signed up for a CDN and WAF through a company called, StackPath. Our main purpose was to protect our WordPress files on our server. StackPath suggested to point the A Record of our server at their IP address. I looked up the IP and it is located in Dallas, TX. All of our customers are US based. This way all website traffic to go through them first before reaching our server.

Is there any reason that this would impact our SEO results or indexing with Google? Has anyone experienced SEO impacts from using a CDN such as StackPath, CloudFlare or SiteLock? Our primary goal is security, but clearly we want good results for our clients including SEO, site speed & security.

Any comments or remakrs are appreciated. Thank you!

For anyone stumbling across this we were able to identify the issue. We had a WordPress installation that had a hidden database full of SPAM and bad links/images etc. The Database could not be located in MySQL which was interesting, so we had the client agree to allow us to delete ALL content and start from scratch. (They had previously been hacked with another vendor but owned their WordPress website). We were migrating the database because they had hundreds of blog posts. We all agreed since they weren't doing any good we would start from scratch.

Deleted entire website off of server, reinstalled WordPress and we've seen a 745% improvement in keyword rankings. We have over 20 keywords now ranking on page 1. Woot!

We create sites for customers that are in the same industry, but non-competing areas. We run into this as we use the same images on each site, but make them look unique.

One way we address this is by simply changing the file name of the image before we upload it to the server as well as creating a unique ALT tag for the image. Google can't really see the image itself, so by giving it a unique name, URL and ALT tag, we've been successful at not having to worry.

In your case, change this part of your image upload: var/news/storage/images/paris-match/people/kim-kardashian-sa-securite-n-a-pas-de-prix-1092112/15629236-1-fre-FR/Kim-Kardashian-sa-securite-n-a-pas-de-prix.jpg

Then, give it a unique ALT such as "Kim Kardashian Paris Securite"

Hi Dirk,

Again, appreciated the second set of eyes on this. Unfortunately, nothing changed. In fact, it got mildly worse with all the changes! I'm at a loss. I'll keep poking around at it. If you have any revelations, please shoot them my way!

The 3 errors listed are for a pop-up chat feature we have running by a company called, Olark. Can this cause issues with Googlebot? This code is embedded into the footer  area of the site.

Thanks Dirk,

Worked on much of what you recommended. We'll wait a week and see what happens. This client had an old blog that we moved over, but it was a mess. She has given us permission to remove these old blogs with broken links and missing images from here site. Your time on this was very much appreciated. Let's see what happens! I am marking this as answered.

Screaming Frog... excellent resource!

Hi Dirk,

I have removed the Country Blocking from Wordfence so you could take a look at it closer. Thank you for your response and time looking into this! Yes, we run Wordfence on all of our sites (over 80 of them) and haven't had any issues with Googlebot accessing them. We started blocking foreign IP addresses about 3 months ago in an effort to curb some of the hacking and brute force attacks we get.

And I'm serious about this small reward! I value your time.

Taber

Really? We have WordFence running on 80 of our sites and don't see any issues with the other sites, all the same type of client as well. Do you have a better suggestions besides WordFence? Perhaps I'll disable it and see if that clears the issue.  And, are you saying that you are seeing a return from Googlebot error or that it CAN cause issues?

This is regarding the domain: http://lesliekays.com

We got a new client about 5 months back who had a website that was hacked. It took several months, but we've cleaned up most of the spammy links and completely rebuilt their website. We have been successful with every other client that we have ever done getting our customers to rank well organically, but we just can't figure this one out. I'm willing to offer a REWARD to the single person who can figure this out for us. (Let's not get carried away, a small reward).  This customer has great quality links to their site too.

We are looking for answers other than:

1. Backlinks

2. Content

3. Malware

4. Domain or Page authority

5. 404 errors

6. We have utilized Googles Webmaster tools endlessly

It is something else and we can not identify it! Let me know what you think! I will give a public shout out to the person who helps us identify this issue!

Hi Peter,

Thank you for your response! I saw you answered a similar question about a week ago, so thank you for weighing in on my options. So, to clarify, I must do this for all 1,205 of the URLs?

One SPAM link is pointing here: http://OURDOMAIN/flibzy/foto-bugil-di-kelas.html  so in your above example, this would look like:

Redirect 410 /dir/http://OURDOMAIN/flibzy/foto-bugil-di-kelas.html/ (?) and do this for each page that Google has indexed?

I saw your example with the iphone on the other post. How did you get that page to say, GONE - The requested resource...

My main question is: How do we remove URLs (links) from Google's index and the 1000s of created 404 errors associated with them after a website was hacked (and now fixed)?

The story: A customer came to us for a new website and some SEO. They had an existing website that had been hacked and their previous vendor was non-responsive to address the issue for months. This created THOUSANDS of URLs on their website that were then linked to pornographic and prescription med SPAM sites. Now, Google has 1,205 pages indexed that create 404 errors on the new site.  I am confident these links are causing Google to not rank well organically.

Additional information:

• Entirely new website
• Wordpress site
• New host

Should we be using the "Remove URLs" tool from Google to submit all 1205 of these pages? Do you think it will make a difference? This is down from the 22,500 URLs that existed when we started a few months back. Thank you in advance for any tips or suggestions!

If someone has a domain that is spammy, such as "http://seattlesbestinsurancerates.com" can this cause Google to not index the website? This is not our domain, but a customer of ours has a similar one and it appears to be causing issues!

Any thoughts? Thanks for any input!

Look at all these tips! Thanks for taking so much time to very clearly outline a plan of attack. Some items have been completed above like local listings and Facebook we updated weekly, but your other points are great. Like you said, time to roll up the sleeves! This is an ultra-competitive market. Thanks so much!

Thanks for taking the time to respond. We'll clean up the page URLs. Agree... could be a bit spammy looking! We'll also work on getting more better links. Million dollar question, any suggestions for quick link building strategies? We'll push out a couple press releases and have done many local directory listings...

Thank you so much for the response. You always take time to review my questions and it is very much appreciated. We were working on launching an entirely new site for him, so that's why we had the duplicate content... nice catch! We shut the other site down to see if this was possibly impacting the site.

Hello!

We've been successful with over 40 clients and getting them to great results in our industry, insurance. We recently acquired a new client who had an existing website with prior SEO results a very spammy blog and many spammy links. We've removed many of the blog articles and links using the Google Disavow Tool

We've been monitoring this site in a campaign on Moz, but we're seeing zero improvement week to week. Can someone put another set of eyes on this and see if we're simply just missing something? Results for all 30 of our tracked keywords, zero are in the top 50!

I would guess this was an algorithm penalty, but it has been 3 months now since we've made the changes and nothing is changing... not even a little bit! Any help/suggestions would be GREATLY appreciated.

Thank you and enjoy Labor Day weekend!

Hello,

I looked through many other Q&A and couldn't find this answer exactly... We build all of our client's sites on WordPress which automatically assign the new websites with no www. at the beginning. Recently one of our customers was upset because his new site (non-www) had only 3 links to it and his old www.domain.com site had 548. Is the simplest way to fix this to go into the WordPress Settings -> General and just change the WordPress Address and Site Address to the www version? Does it even matter or does WordPress tell Google to look at both versions. We don't see any SERP impact by having the non-www version up, but if it is an easy fix to get the 548 link credit I'll take it!

Reason I'm concerned is I do see the difference in OSE and would prefer to have 548 links vs. 3 also!

Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks community!

Thank you for the responses. Thought that might have been the issue, but with your responses, I will move forward to try to get the links to appear more natural. Again, really appreciate everyone's input!

Were you ever able to recover your web rankings? I have the same issue on one of our client's sites and it is driving me crazy. Our site is a WordPress site. Was yours by chance? Wonder if some plugin caused it somehow...

Thanks!