
Diving into Technical SEO Using Cloudflare Workers - jgrahamc
https://blog.cloudflare.com/diving-into-technical-seo-cloudflare-workers/
======
StavrosK
Cloudflare Workers sound cool, but their pricing is, to me, all wrong. I'd
like to try them out on some of my low-volume side-projects to see if I'll
find them useful and like them, but $5 per month per site is more than I pay
for the entire server for _all the sites combined_.

I don't like being that guy who asks for free stuff, but a free tier would at
least mean that I get to spend an hour or two trying the feature out. Not that
$5 is a prohibitive cost, but Workers haven't sounded good enough to take my
credit card out for.

~~~
codezero
I wonder if there is some way to use these maliciously that makes offering a
free tier undesirable. Five dollars seems like an artificial barrier. It’s
basically free, but requires you to put some money down, and get your finances
on record.

I agree, developers in general will adopt faster if it’s free, or if there is
a reasonable trial period, but in this case I am wondering if there’s more to
this.

~~~
rmoaiandin
There is a free trial period if I remember correctly.

~~~
jmadruga
[https://blog.cloudflare.com/announcing-workers-
dev/](https://blog.cloudflare.com/announcing-workers-dev/)

We hear you. Head on over and reserve a subdomain, free.

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howinator
It's possible I'm missing something, but everything in this blog post seems
extremely narrowly applicable.

The author points out that you should just handle redirects in the platform if
you can. For hreflang tags, is there a reason besides using a legacy system
that you need to inject hreflang tags outside your app/platform?

~~~
maxmcd
It seems that "platform" in this instance is referring to some kind of CDN.
Some CDNs handle redirects well, but some don't. Cloudflare workers are on the
"edge" and this is "edge SEO" (apparently). Most CDNs don't allow the types of
modifications present in this blog post.

~~~
howinator
AAhhh that makes more sense! In that case, edits at the edge do make a lot of
sense.

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krn
Am I right thinking, that there are no viable alterneratives to Cloudflare
Workers on the market at the moment?

And if you decide to move from Cloudflare to another major CDN provider, you
will have to change how your product works?

Because that's what StackOverflow and Reddit did. They are not using
Cloudflare anymore.

So, does using Cloudflare Workers create a serious vendor lock-in, that makes
changing a CDN provider much more costly in the future?

EDIT: I am thinking primarily about Fastly, as it's where the majority of
large players move from Cloudflare. Also, about KeyCDN, which can be a much
more cost-efficient alternative to the Cloudflare's Enterprise plan.

~~~
kasey_junk
Depends on what you mean. There are several 'smart' CDN offerings out there.
Amazon Cloudfront Lambda's and [https://fly.io/](https://fly.io/) jump
immediately to mind.

I believe you'd need to port your CDN code when moving on any of those
platforms though. You might get away without re-architecting anything else.

~~~
mrkurt
Hi! I'm from fly.io!

You can write JavaScript that runs just fine on both fly.io and Cloud Flare
workers. We both target the in browser Service Worker API. We actually have a
few users that deploy the same code to us + Cloud Flare, and use our runtime
for local testing + CI:
[https://github.com/superfly/fly](https://github.com/superfly/fly)

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eberkund
Has anyone here used Cloudflare workers yet? I know they just launched
recently. \- Where you using new or existing code (coming from Lambda for
example)? \- How did the performance compare? \- Did you run into any
difficulties?

~~~
kmf
Yes, it's a super rad product. Using it for a few things, so far:

1) Working on a project right now that provides edge-level analytics for your
sites w/ a focus on privacy: more accurate than Google Analytics (JS blockers
remove ~1/3 of your traffic stats) and less icky for your users. Funny this
comes up, I'm putting together a list for people who are interested in beta
testing, if that sounds appealing: [https://xyz.us16.list-
manage.com/subscribe?u=0b8a0e873d096aa...](https://xyz.us16.list-
manage.com/subscribe?u=0b8a0e873d096aad47c111571&id=5f56b6cabd)

2) Extreme caching on a Wordpress site – using Cloudflare's edge cache WP
plugin[1] and the worker from the workers-example repo[2] – currently at a 97%
cache hit rate across the site.

update: just double-checked the cache hit stat on Cloudflare, after writing
this comment - actually have a 99.95% cache rate as of today (!)

[1] [https://wordpress.org/plugins/cloudflare-page-
cache/](https://wordpress.org/plugins/cloudflare-page-cache/)

[2] [https://github.com/cloudflare/worker-
examples/tree/master/ex...](https://github.com/cloudflare/worker-
examples/tree/master/examples/edge-cache-html)

~~~
reinder
> JS blockers remove ~1/3 of your traffic stats

I'd love to hear more about this – could you elaborate? Any resources you can
share to back it up? Thx!

~~~
tatersolid
Basically anyone who uses Firefox, or anyone who has uBlock, AdBlock, uMatrix,
Purify, etc. the installed is invisible to JS-based analytics. They simply
never load the GOogle Analytics, NewRelic, or whatever code as part of their
“tracking protection”.

In financial services, we see about 15% higher unique users per day when
analyzing HTTP logs versus Google Analytics. In fact, I’ve heard but not
verified that GA now applies a “correction factor” to their stats to account
for this.

------
seanwilson
> When we first started out, we needed to implement simple redirects, which
> should be easy to create on the majority of platforms but wasn’t supported
> in this instance.

> When the second barrier arose, we needed to inject Hreflang tags, cross-
> linking an old multi-lingual website on a bespoke platform build to an
> outdated spec. This required experiments to find an efficient way of
> implementing the tags without increasing latency or adding new code to the
> server – in a manner befitting of search engine crawling.

Is this a primary use case? When it's not practical to make the changes at the
origin server?

What are the use cases when you are able to make server changes more easily?

Can you test what workers will do on a local development site somehow?

~~~
ploxiln
> Is this a primary use case? When it's not practical to make the changes at
> the origin server?

One major use-case, yes. "We'll pay big bucks for you to fix the website. But
also, we can't make any changes to the website." Fine, "patch" it with
Cloudflare, just one more layer on top of the un-fixable mess for the next guy
to deal with (in exchange for even bigger bucks).

~~~
rmoaiandin
Our use cases were on very well built websites and platforms. Just to give you
an example:

\- Redirects: We have several clients in the tech industry who host their docs
and pages on Github pages. Github pages doesn't support 301s. This allowed us
to both create 301s correctly and have a more manageable 301 platform for the
non-development team.

\- A/B testing through ghosting: A very large e-commerce client of ours wanted
to run A/B test by ghosting (not to change URL) and slow roll out of the new
platform. Through this they could chose which URL's were on the new platform
and which ones on the old one and slowly rolled it all out.

In the future you will also be able to create pipelines so that there is a
better management and audit process for bigger firms with security protocols
around.

So, there are more benefits to this than just "When it's not practical to make
the changes at the origin server". Infact if you are just "patching" then it's
trouble.

