Website Security Tips for SEO
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A hacked website can seriously affect your search engine optimization efforts. This article will explain the three ways it can hurt you, the major forms of attack, what makes a site vulnerable to them, and what you can do to protect your site from hackers.
A hacked website's impact on SEO can be separated into three major categories:
Effect on search engine ranking. Major search engines like Google will penalize your website as an "attacked" site or site hosting malware, and then your rankings will be dropped until the website has fully recovered from the attack.
This loss of rankings will of course affect website traffic, which your website needs in order to produce sales and profit.
Effect on customer quality experience and security. Sometimes, even though a site is not hosting malware (and is not labeled with the "This site may harm your computer" warning in Google's search results), if your website security is compromised and you're not aware of it, the attacker can plant scripts in your website in such a way as to steal your customers' personal and financial information.
Examples of this information include user passwords, Social Security numbers, credit card information, etc.
Effect on trust. If your website security is compromised and your website has been confirmed as hosting an attacker who steals customer information, you might be liable to cover for damages, refunds, etc. The worst part is that the "trust" you may have once had as a reputable and secure merchant will be lost. And of course, it will be very hard to re-establish and recover your lost reputation.
No matter how good your website's SEO is, if you ignore the site's security issues, then all of your efforts to increase rankings and traffic will be gone in an instant the moment an attacker gets inside your website and compromises everything.
This article will examine some of the most common security issues found in most commercial and non-commercial websites and suggest some tips to help you improve or tighten the security.
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