It is speculated with good reasons that there are more than 150 factors that affect your SEO rankings. Google has not shared what all of them are, but marketers have been taking a lot of them into account while performing SEO. From load times to mobile optimization and backlinks, there are a lot of things SEO specialists need to be concerned about.
As Google’s algorithms get smarter. one key factor that marketers have started working on more closely is user security. Cyber Security may not influence your SEO as directly as say backlinks or good content, but it is crucial in providing a good user experience. If your security isn’t tight, your site’s SEO will be affected. In this post, we look at the cost of cyber SEO factors on ranking, along with nine examples.
The Biggest Cost: Blacklisting
If you’re not managing your cyber SEO properly, it can ultimately lead to the ultimate cost – a google penalty i.e. your site getting blacklisted. Once this happens, you will not be allowed to rank on Google’s search result pages. Since more than half of the web users come across a site through organic search and given how Google has the majority market share, it is likely that no one will be able to find your site by searching online.
Penalties from Google’s Algorithm
Google’s algorithm is used to evaluate the quality of a website. You will drop in the rankings if your website doesn’t meet its expectations of what an effective site entails. One of Google’s most important algorithm updates is Penguin, which penalized sites with suspicious links, or Panda, which slammed thin content.
You might now have a delightful content strategy and link building strategy in line with Google’s algorithm. However, sites with poor cyber SEO leave themselves open to hacking, and hackers may damage all of your hard work. This makes it clear that you would need to focus on the cyber SEO elements too.
Manual Penalties
Google will tell you if you get a manual penalty through your Google Search Console. A manual penalty does not come from algorithms. It means that a representative from Google found out something on your website which goes against their guidelines. To get a manual penalty removed, you will have to go through a time consuming process involving a lot of steps. Meanwhile, your site would remain blacklisted. On Google’s manual actions page, you can view the full list of reasons for penalties, including a number of site issues that can be caused by hackers due to weak website security.
How can Website Security affect your SEO?
1. SSL Certificate
Quite an obvious cyber SEO issue. Back in 2014, Google did confirm that HTTPS plays a role in ranking and SEO. With an SSL certificate, you’ll have better encryption over the browser from the client’s end and your server. This will lead to more secure monetary transactions. Customers that are aware about this do not stay on a site which doesn’t have HTTPS security. So not having it would mean less traffic, high bounce rates and less monetary transactions.
Even though high bounce rates are not a direct ranking factor, they certainly have indirect effects. Google’s algorithm can detect if high numbers of users land on a website before immediately leaving and this signals to the algorithm that the page in question isn’t relevant to the original query. Google wants to show more relevant results, so this will affect your search rankings.
2. Outdated Software
We tend to ignore updates on various platforms we use when we’re working on some urgent project. This can prove to be a big mistake. Upgrades will need to be performed on everything from your CMS platform to your operational platform, security software, and plug-ins. If you keep putting them off, you will be more vulnerable to cyber attacks. When a site is hacked through vulnerable software, everything recorded on it can be accessed. And that can lead to a lot more problems than just bad rankings.
3. Spamming
A popular tactic amongst hackers is spamming. Once they find an opening through your old software, they will spam it with lots of content and links. They might even change your content and add their own. The links will redirect to pages unrelated to your own site, so they are in violation of Google’s guidelines. So you’ll be looking at a Penguin penalty.
4. Deletion of Content
Besides spamming, hackers are also capable of deleting files from your content management system (CMS), resulting in 404 error pages. Even though an occasional 404 page is inevitable on a website, a large number of them will hinder your SEO. All the work your content team has put into developing pillar pages and topic clusters could be wiped out in an instant. Your site can quickly go from being a leading authority and being unable to deliver content that matches users’ search intent.
5. Users lose Trust in your Site
Once word gets out that your site has been compromised (for big companies it may even make the headlines) users will rapidly lose trust. Additionally, if there is a breach of customer data, it can be an uphill struggle to restore customer confidence. In the end, no matter how well you fix the problem, employ all the latest security measures, build a new site, and have an impeccable SEO profile, you won’t survive without your users. Without a good number of clicks from users, your ranking will drop.
6. Duplicate content
Site scrapers typically create duplicate content after a security breach, which is bad for SEO. Google could penalize your site before you even know it has been duplicated elsewhere, believing that you are the one doing all the duplication.
You can use various methods to make it clear that you are the original creator. Copyrights can be added, or the author of your content can be verified by adding tags to the page’s html code. The most effective method is to keep better track of your cyber SEO and make sure no one hacks your site to begin with.
7. Distorted analytics
As you have seen, poor security can negatively impact various SEO ranking factors. Indirectly, it can also wreak havoc on your SEO strategies by messing with your data. A frightening thought is that over 20% of all web traffic is generated by less-than-moral crawlers. Dodgy crawlers may be inflating your traffic figures, which could influence your SEO strategies. Not ideal in an age of data.
8. Overloaded server can block Google bots
You can experience server capacity issues if you have a large number of dodgy bots crawling your site. Your website’s performance will suffer if your capacity is clogged up with unwanted visitors-an SEO ranking factor in and of itself. In addition, Google’s bots may not be able to successfully crawl your website. This will result in incorrect rankings. You can block specific bots from your website or prevent all bots from accessing certain parts of the site in order to reduce server load. You can reduce the crawl rate of a search engine’s own bots if their bots are causing overload.
9. Site downtime: No rankings
Lastly, cyber attacks can bring down your website for minutes, days, or even weeks. When users cannot access your site, they will give up trying. When a site is unable to be crawled, Google will return, but if the site has been infected with ransomware, the problem can be difficult to resolve, resulting in lengthy downtime. Your SERP rankings will be impacted as a result.
Conclusion
In order to prevent hacking, most webmasters take security seriously. A breach may not be known to them for its direct consequences or the long-term implications it can have on their organic search potential. Security must be viewed from a business SEO perspective – one that takes the big picture into account. When you know how to look for SEO-related data in your tests, updates, and processes, you will add another layer of security. Hopefully, you’ll be able to spot a breach sooner than Google.
