The idea for Sloth was born out of the needs of two enterprise clients, both of which had platform and development restrictions that prevented them from achieving what they were trying to do.
The first two pieces of research and tests focused around implementing redirects en masse and implementing Hreflang across a number of ccTLDs and platforms. This was for a single global brand that had let local marketing teams move away from a single platform and model.
Other alternatives would have been to deploy changes through Google Tag Manager or JavaScript, but these are not often reliable solutions. Building on Cloudflare’s existing and reliable products, these solutions can help SEOs and webmasters everywhere.
The first Sloth
The first Sloth came about while we (the team at SALT.agency) were working on migrating a tech client from Gitpages to WordPress, which included merging one domain into another.
At the time, Gitpages did not support redirects and we needed a robust, reliable solution. Seeing an opportunity to use a recently released serverless technology (Cloudflare Workers), we created the first Sloth worker bundle to manage and maintain redirects. These behaved no differently to any other redirect implementation, and the migration was a success.
The second Sloth
The second Sloth was a little more complex, and the research behind whether or not the use of Cloudflare Workers was viable, formed the basis of our talk at TechSEO Boost 2018.
The client we used was a global travel brand, with multiple ccTLDs and platforms in operation across more than 15 markets. Due to platform and development constraints, implementing any form of Hreflang using one of the traditional ways was not possible.
However, through Cloudflare Workers, we were able to devise a solution that would deploy Hreflang to each of the websites in a manageable way.
Alpha testing
At TechSEO Boost 2018 we revealed Sloth.cloud to the industry, along with research that demonstrated how Cloudflare Workers could be used for SEO purposes, and that those implementations were indeed respected by search engines.
We opened up Sloth to Alpha testing at this point, and the tool is currently trusted by a range of websites around the world to provide a solution to problems that were previously insurmountable.