It may seem a little odd to think that website security directly impacts your website’s SEO performance, but if preventative measures aren’t taken it will have a lasting impact for your search rankings.
Top Three Cyber Threats That impact your SEO:
- Blacklisting: Google and other search engines regularly scan websites for malware. If malware is detected your website can be blacklisted. By not addressing website malware you may be removed from search engine results and users won’t be able to find it at all. Even without being blacklisted, a website’s rankings can still suffer from an attack.
- Crawling errors: Bots represent a large portion of your website traffic, but not all bots are helpful. At least 19% of bots crawl websites for content scraping, vulnerability identification or data theft. If strange 404 or 503 errors appear for pages that aren’t missing on your website, it’s possible Google is trying to crawl them but your server is reporting them as missing.
- Lack of an SSL certificate: In general, websites with SSL certificates rank better in the search results. A SSL certificate encrypts your customer data such as credit card information and login credentials. If you submit an online payment, login to an account or subscribe to a newsletter, an SSL certificate prevents cybercriminals from stealing your information. While an SSL certificate doesn’t protect your website, it does protect information traveling to and from the site.
Website security and marketing plans are not usually discussed in the same meetings but they should be. You want to be proactive and set your company above the competition by protecting against any vulnerabilities. It can be a move that sets you apart.
To maintain your reputation and customer trust, it’s essential to protect your website from cyberthreats. Prevention is the only solution and we offer many different preventative managed security services. Check out our recent blog explaining how we’re software and technology innovators.
