Ask HN: Azure with Cloudflare, good SEO choice?
I want to use Cloudflare for SSL and optimizations on my ASP.NET Core/Angular2 website. Is this a good choice? Of course I want good performance and good search engine rankings.
A CDN (Cloudflare or other) will help since Google also uses page speed as a ranking signal[1]. (Other Cloudflare features like HTTP/2 will also help with page speed).
As far as the Angular portion goes, single page apps _could_ hurt rankings, but shouldn't with Google[2]. However, I'd still suggest looking into Angular Universal. It'll allow you to serve a server-side rendered version of the page when it's first loaded, which will make it easier for search engines to scrape your application. After that initial load, the application will use client-side Angular.
There's an Angular University blog post which provides some information on that[3].
Obviously there's plenty of other search engines that aren't Google. For search engines that don't use page speed or HTTPS as a ranking signal, those won't be important (but are still important in general!). For search engines that don't execute JavaScript or have a poor understanding of Single Page Applications, server-side rendering will be super important.
[0]: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2014/08/https-as-ranking-s...
[1]: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-i...
[2]: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2014/05/understanding-web-...
[3]: http://blog.angular-university.io/angular-2-universal-meet-t...
I ask myself if Cloudflare is needed when I already use Azure. Can it hurt my search engine rankings? Getting SSL for free (and quick setup in comparison to Azure+Let's encrypt!) with Cloudflare is nice.