CloudFlare, a service that accelerates and protects websites by combining the best parts of a content delivery network (CDN) and network-level spam/malware/DDoS prevention tool, is what I would call one of the best things to happen to the internet in recent years.

Does IP address affect your sites ranking in Google?

One of the oldest myths about search engine optimization (SEO) is that hosting sites on the same IP (Internet Protocol) address can be harmful to your search engine result pages (SERPs). There is debate whether or not this is true to any extent, or to what degree it affects SERPs. CloudFlare makes this irrelevant by routing all traffic to CloudFlare-protected sites through 13 IPv4 blocks. This means that depending on how often CloudFlare rotates the IP addresses it is serving a site from, its IP address will change often and randomly.

While obviously the main focus of SEO is excellent content and good websites, CloudFlare does help out by reducing the average load time of your website’s pages by around half, and simultaneously reducing the traffic your site’s server sees by about 60%. This can have a tremendous impact on SERPs, because search engines prioritize faster sites above slower sites. Faster sites increase user engagement, making them more likely to spend more time there, so doubling your site’s speed can make a huge difference!

What This Means to You: Faster Sites on Cloudflare means higher rankings.  Get the best hosting you can for your site if you want to be at the top of Google.