If you’re considering incorporating a PBN into your SEO strategy, you’ve likely heard of Cloudflare, a popular content delivery network. But should you use Cloudflare for your PBNs?
In this article, we’ll explore the advantages of using Cloudflare for your Private Blog Network. We’ll break down what Cloudflare is, how it works, and whether it can provide the security and performance benefits needed to enhance the efficacy of your PBN.
What is a Cloudflare?
Cloudflare is a web infrastructure and website security company that offers Content Delivery Network (CDN) solutions. These solutions have the primary purpose of making websites more secure, faster, and efficient. Cloudflare achieves this by using a distributed network of servers located across the globe.
Benefits of using Cloudflare
Protecting Your Website
Cloudflare protects against attacks and hacking attempts, ensuring that your website remains secure and operational. It filters out spam attacks and offers protection from threats like DDoS attacks, SQL injection, and comment spam, creating a safe online environment. You can also control and block unknown or unwanted traffic using WAF rules.
Improving Website Speed
Cloudflare offers features designed to make your website faster and more efficient. These include:
- Image Resizing: You can adjust the size of images from the original source, making them suitable for different devices.
- Polish Feature: This feature optimizes the loading time of images hosted on your domain, resulting in quicker image delivery.
- Minification: Cloudflare supports the reduction in the size of three file types: JavaScript, CSS, and HTML. When enabled, this feature reduces the file size of your website’s source code, contributing to faster load times.
Improving Website Performance
Cloudflare improves how your website performs in two important ways:
- Faster Loading: Cloudflare has servers all over the world that are closer to people who visit your website. This means your website’s pages load faster because they fetch data from the nearest server, not the one far away. When pages load quickly, people tend to stay longer and explore more.
- Always Online: Cloudflare’s’ Always Online’ feature is like a safety net. It stores a static version of your website in a special place on the internet. If your website’s main server has a problem, this stored version keeps your website accessible. I’ve seen Cloudflare save websites and keep them online even when the main server has issues.
Page Rules and Caching
Cloudflare’s Page Rules feature gives the option for website owners to customize how incoming website requests are handled. This universal tool allows you to set specific actions, such as URL redirection and file caching.
Page Rules offer valuable options, including:
- Cache Everything: This rule acts as a catch-all, ensuring that static and anonymous content is cached for faster delivery.
- Bypass Cache on Cookie: By identifying specific cookies, this rule bypasses caching for requests that match, keeping dynamic content fresh.
- Bypass Cache: For certain pages or content, you can choose not to cache them at all.
- Edge Cache TTL: You can specify how long Cloudflare retains cached resources in its edge network before requesting updates from the origin server. This TTL (Time to Live) can be set anywhere from 14 days to just 1 hour, offering flexibility to suit your needs.
SSL: Secure and Free
Cloudflare provides a universal SSL certificate for free, and it works with any plan, including the free one. This SSL certificate is a modern security tool that not only keeps your website safe but also makes web pages load faster. When your web pages load quickly, it creates a better experience for your website’s visitors. Plus, Cloudflare handles the renewal of your Edge certificates each year, so you don’t have to worry about it.
Quirk.biz Experts Tips On How To Use Cloudflare For Your PBN’s
Based on our years of experience with building and managing PBNs, we want to share with you our tips on how to use Cloudflare for your PBNs. Having all of your network on the same IP and Name Servers is a huge fingerprint. It is something that is very easy and fast to be checked for multiple sites at once. That is why one of the most important things to consider when building your PBNs is to spread your website across different IPs and NS.
- With Cloudflare, you can buy one hosting and put a large part of your network on it without the need to buy additional IP addresses. This is possible because Cloudflare effectively hides the IP addresses and nameservers of your websites.
- Cloudflare is free, but it’s important to know that when you create a single account, all your domains in this account will share the same IP and NS. For this, you must use a different account for each domain. So, depending on the network size, you may need to use different email addresses. We suggest using services like Protonmail, mail.com (which offers ten free aliases for each email), or any other authentication-free email providers.
- We recommend using Cloudflare on only a part of your PBNs rather than all of them. To learn the optimal way to set up Cloudflare, check out here.
- It’s important to note that even when using Cloudflare, there are always ways to find the IP address and compromise the network. However, these methods are complex to manage, and overall, Cloudflare continues to provide a reasonably secure option.
Conclusion
Using Cloudflare for your PBNs offers a range of benefits, from improved security and faster loading times to global performance improvement. However, it’s essential to remember that no solution is entirely foolproof, and IP address exposure remains a potential concern. Ultimately, choosing to use Cloudflare in your PBN strategy should be based on your specific network’s needs and goals.
