We were able to see several businesses moving online in recent years, which is one of the primary reasons why website security impacts the SEO Ranking Of Your Website has gained traction.
Another important thing to note is that cybercrimes have increased by nearly 60 percent due to the Covid19 pandemic. This has urged several businesses to implement essential website security measures to protect their site.
There is a common misconception that hackers and cybercriminals will target only large-scale businesses. That’s not true because approximately 43 percent of cyber attacks target small-scale businesses. It doesn’t matter how large or small your business is, if you have valuable data, then hackers may attempt to steal it.
It is important to understand that website and data security have become an essential requirement these days. To reinforce this, Google has already started to reward sites, which are meeting adequate security standards. For instance, websites that are using HTTPS will have better SEO rankings when compared to other websites.
Why Web Security Affects Search Engine Optimization
Do you know that there are more than 200 ranking factors that Google considers to determine how and where to rank a website? One of the most important ranking factors of Google is website security or how protected your website is.
In fact, the search engine giant, Google made it clear that website security is a major priority. Google also stated that they have been making several investments to ensure that Gmail, Google Drive, and all their services will have top-notch privacy and security tools by default to make the internet safer.
HTTPS Is a Ranking Factor
Most digital marketers will be well aware of the fact websites need to earn organic search rankings. However, several online marketers often fail to realize the fact that the primary g0al of Search Engine Optimization is not to impress Google, but to please users by delivering what they need.
As a result, you will need to present users with authoritative and relevant content. In addition to that, you should remember that an unsecure website will risk the online safety of users, which will in turn negatively impact your SEO efforts.
You will need to switch your website from HTTP to HTTPS to ensure that the data on the website is secure and safe. You will need to buy an SSL certificate to switch your website to the HTTPS domain distinction. If you are on a budget, then it is best to opt for a single domain from reputed certificate authorities like GeoTrust, GlobalSign, cheap RapidSSL certificate, Thawte SSL, etc.
Most of the popular and top websites over the web have started using HTTPS for quite some time. If you are still using HTTP on your website, you will be making your website look outdated and highly vulnerable to cyber attacks.
Blacklisting
From the above statements, you would have probably understood that the security of your website will directly affect SEO. This is mainly because hackers and cybercriminals plant malicious links on unprotected websites, which might get your business associated with places where you do not want to be.
This type of link building activity might make Google and other search engines identify your site as spam, which will undo all SEO efforts that you have put in. There is also a possibility for your website to get blacklisted, which is something all businesses try to avoid.
Trust
When internet users visit websites that are using HTTP, then they receive a “Not Secure’ warning on the URL. Most internet users will be hesitant to visit websites that are not secure because they will have trust issues. So, if you have not updated from HTTP to HTTPS, you risk losing a major percent of your customers.
Fortunately, you will be able to avoid such hassles by investing in an SSL certificate and upgrading your website to HTTPS. This will help you to gain the trust of customers and they are more likely to spend more time on your website.
Crawling Errors
Bots will be representing a considerable part of your site and app traffic, but you need to understand that some of the bots will not be benign. In fact, nearly 19 percent of bots will crawl your website for data theft, vulnerability identification, content scraping, and other malicious purposes.
Even if they fail to succeed, constant attacks through automated software solutions will prevent Googlebot from crawling your website adequately. Malicious bots often make use of the same server resources and bandwidth as a normal visitor or legitimate bot would.
If your server becomes constantly subject to automated and repetitive tasks from multiple bots for a longer period of time, it will throttle the traffic to your website. As a response to this, your web server might stop serving web pages altogether.
If you are able to see strange 503 or 404 errors on the Google Search console for web pages that are not missing, then Google might have tried to crawl them, but your web server reported them to be missing.
SEO Spam
Most online marketers and website admins would have probably heard about SEO spam. It is connected directly to your SEO, and it might indicate that the SEO rank of your website is dropping.
Hackers and cybercriminals may introduce spam content into your site. From links to pages of spam content, can be introduced to your website, which will redirect website visitors to pages that you don’t want your business to be associated with.
It is one of the commonly reported issues. In fact, a report shared by GoDaddy indicated that approximately 62 percent of their client websites contained SEO spam. This in turn means that SEO can be a factor that may compromise the security of a website.
Final Thoughts
SEO is essential if you want your business to generate more sales and build a strong online reputation for your business. If you fail to implement essential security measures, then it will present a bad image to website visitors, which will negatively impact your entire business. Fortunately, you can avoid such issues by putting more focus on website security.