💔 How Roskomnadzor Accidentally Tanked My Russian Traffic! A Dev's SEO Story
I relied on Cloudflare for my latest SEO project. It’s the industry standard, right? But a silent blockage by Roskomnadzor in summer 2025 severely cut off my access to Russian users. The hard lesson: for critical markets, you need to own your infrastructure.
The Mystery of the Missing Traffic
I’m a frontend dev based abroad, building a large-scale SEO project to sharpen my skills. Things looked great on paper: Yandex had indexed a massive 12,500 pages.
But despite that success, my actual traffic from Russia was near zero.
The Invisible Wall
I started troubleshooting. The culprit wasn't my code or my SEO strategy—it was the network layer.
It turns out Roskomnadzor had blocked traffic from specific Cloudflare IP ranges. Since I am not in Russia, I had no way of knowing my site was effectively down for thousands of users on major Russian ISPs. My "performance layer" had become a firewall.
The Fix: Nginx & VDS
To fix it, I had to remove the middleman.
- Disable Cloudflare: I turned off the proxy completely.
- Rebuild Security & Caching: I manually configured Nginx on my own VDS to replicate the essential features I was getting for free (caching, compression, basic security).
The Result: Immediate access restoration. All 12,500 pages are now reachable from the Russian Federation.
The Takeaway
In highly regulated markets, "set it and forget it" services like Cloudflare can be a liability. The safest bet is often the old-school one: a highly customized VDS + Nginx setup that you control 100%. Don't let your users become collateral damage in a provider ban.