The Double-Edged Sword of Web Security and How It Affects SEO

While cybersecurity is crucial to keep data and information secured, it also affects your website’s SEO. In this article, we will explore how the security measures you use for your website could alter the effectiveness of Search Engine Optimisation and the steps you can take to amend the same.

Website security is getting more and more popular as many businesses are moving online to conduct their business. But with a growing number of companies moving into the digital space, the cases of cybercrimes have also gone up exponentially.

According to numbers shared by readwrite.com, in the first quarter of 2019, 1 billion data records were breached, with approximately 62 per cent of businesses experiencing phishing cases in 2018. Furthermore, it is estimated that cybercriminals are now attacking at an average of 39 times every hour, which means around 2,244 attacks every day.

Let’s explore some steps and strategies to protect your website SEO.

Table of Contents

Applying HTTPS and SSL certificates is a good plan

It is essential to use an SSL Certificate because it will encrypt your in-transit data and confidential information between a browser and your website’s server and, inversely, from the website server to the browser.

The information sent between a server and the browser goes through many different devices, and if any one of the devices has been hacked, then the data could be copied, stolen, or compromised. HTTPS protocol eliminates instances of MITM attacks. Selecting the right SSL certificate can be a challenging task to nail. We suggest going for the premium yet cheap RapidSSL certificates, AlphaSSL certificates & Comodo SSL certificates.

Avoid getting browser blacklisting.

It is important to constantly upgrade your cybersecurity strategy and ensure that your website is not banned or blacklisted. Blacklisting websites is a method used by search engines to protect browsers from malicious content that can be damaging or dangerous for data. Google and other search engines send bots to crawl suspicious content on websites.

This can be very damaging for businesses online and can affect sales as well as reputation. If your website is blacklisted, it will result in low visibility, which causes traffic on your website to drop substantially. Your SEO efforts will become a bulk and ineffective cost, and the longer the warning sign remains on the site, the more the damage will amplify.

It Is Essential to Build Trust Online.

Having an online presence is one thing, but to conduct business successfully online, you need first to establish trust with your audience. Being trustworthy can be challenging for new businesses mainly because your site is likely to be unknown in the industry it functions or exists. Having proper security measures in place can build your brand and businesses trust among your audience because a trustworthy website is well-designed and has high-security features. Customers and visitors will not trust your website if there is no sign of any security.

Be Wary of Malicious Bots.

There might be many instances where search engines try to reach your website but fail to do so. These are called crawling errors. But to understand crawling errors and effectively stop them, we must comprehend what exactly is crawling. Simply put, the process where a search engine like Google or Bing tries to reach a website using a bot is called crawling.

These bots crawl or go through pages and indexes of the content of websites and link it with the query raised in the search engine to give accurate results to the user finally. As a website owner, your main aim is to ensure that these bots from the search engines can access your pages to make your website visible to the right audience.

If this process fails, it is called a crawling error. But you need to understand that, unlike search engine bots, not all bots are friendly. Some bots would index results based on what they find. Malicious bots will scan a website and identify key vulnerable spots for security breaches. It is hence imperative that you take all the necessary steps to eliminate these malicious bots.

In conclusion, having web security measures can drastically affect your SEO impact. Their absence could dent its rankings; just one single cybersecurity attack can destroy everything you might have built over the years. From your sales to your reputation, everything could be ruined with just one cyber-attack.

Hence it becomes essential to protect your SEO by having HTTPS enabled with an SSL certificate that ensures a safe communication passage between the server and your website. Furthermore, doing a regular security audit is also very important to identify the security gaps. In the end, of course, the security of your website is solely your responsibility, and the more you invest in it, the harder it becomes for a cybercriminal to attack.