SSL with Cloudflare and SEO

[Ryan Nielson]

I enabled SSL with Cloudflare's free service and immediately experienced a dramatic drop in my page rank. I used to be in the top three for my keyword, but am no longer in the top 4 pages even. Have I done something wrong with my redirects or is this a known issue with Cloudflare?

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} stratics.com [NC] 
RewriteRule ^/(.*) https://stratics.com/$2 [R=301,NC]

 

[Ryan Nielson]

I just tried changing the rule to this instead:

RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]

 

[Ryan Nielson]

I think what was happening is Cloudflare was already redirecting http to HTTPS before the request ever reached my server. As a result, the 301 redirect was never sent. I would need to create a 301 redirect on the Cloudflare server to ensure the crawlers get the information.

I opted to just disable SSL until HTTP 2 is released. It was causing too many headaches and I don't really need it right now.

 

[Moscato]

Assuming everything works fine, you'll likely take a SEO dip for a couple weeks, and then increase afterwards.

It's a tiny change though, and will hurt ad money if you use ads.