SEO is just as relevant in today’s digital environment as any job undertaken by the sales or engineering divisions.
Nearly all of today’s businesses have on-site SEO interns, or a virtual SEO squad assembled within their permanent employees. This is because the higher you rate in Google, the more likely people can find your goods, services and ‘content.’ Traffic comes with exploration, and traffic also brings in new buyers and sales.
Some businesses have large SEO departments that take charge of all the SEO tasks involved, such as keyword research , marketing management, link building, negative SEO, penalization and recovery review, and much more.
But while digital businesses find their investment in SEO a priority, they seem to lose sight of something very important: cybersecurity.
In this post, we will discuss how cybersecurity impacts SEO, and why your website, applications, and servers should still have data protection as part of your business strategy.
What happens if you get hacked?
There are lots of situations where a security breach can impact you. Some are hacking the database that you are using, some are hacking the DNS and HTTP servers, and some include clear root compromise over SSH.
Note: attacks can not only be executed against applications, providers and websites, they can also attack domain names. The most popular domain attack is ‘domain hijacking,’ which effectively means gaining ownership of the registrar-level domain name.
Downtime is one of the most common consequences after a hacker attack, particularly when it involves a direct server compromise or large DDoS.This affects not just your own access to your website but also the access to your services and data by your customers.
Many businesses store their customers personal and confidential data, such as names, addresses , telephone numbers, emails, passwords, bank and credit card numbers, and more. This is one of the top areas that crackers can loot when they hack your databases.
The effects of this sort of data breach — both for businesses and customers — can be catastrophic, depending on how much information the perpetrators receive. Apart from the technological implications, the worst thing that can happen after a breach of cybersecurity could be how much harm your reputation is after the incident.
This involves losing the trust of your clients, customers, financial institutions that partner with you, and others.
On any given day, your online brand can become a negative company, something that’s incredibly hard to reverse. A lot of the competition is waiting for you to make a mistake — so that they can benefit from it.
A security compromise can have major consequences. After a major security breach, many corporations don’t even survive, and have to close their businesses.
How does cybersecurity effect your SEO ratings?
404 Errors
“Error 404-content not found” is one of the error messages most widely used on the internet. It simply means that there was no discovery of the material that used to be there; hence, it is absent. When you enter the URL, you know it, but web crawlers like Google sometimes find this kind of mistake, and that is where the problems start.
Although Google is a little permissive with 404 errors, when attached to the site for a long time, they may become a big stumbling block for the SEO.
Web files and pages are frequently erased by crackers, leading to scattered or even major 404 errors around the website.
Downtime
Downtime is one of the business owner’s worst fears, whether it’s a small domain, ecommerce shop, or multi-million dollar corporation. We will never want to have our pages down.
Since downtime means that your content, goods and services for your current or existing clients are no longer available, this can be a perfect chance for your rival to deliver everything you want.
From the ‘enterprise’ point of view it is obvious that it is not pleasant at all to lose clients or new revenue during downtime, often even catastrophic .. In the worst case cases, downtime will last hours, days or even weeks depending on the type of attack you face.
Getting your website up and working smoothly and ready for web-crawlers is still a priority when it comes to SEO. Just discovering a single one of your pages down is a critical issue for Googlebot to come crawling to your site.
It can come back later — Google won’t lower the rankings overnight, just on the same day may attempt and re-crawl to see whether the web is back up — but hours or days of downtime may be severe. It decides the amount of drop-down SERP ( Search Engine Results Page) your site is going to receive.
Conclusion
Businesses rely on excellent SEO tactics for generating traffic and producing income. Filling the site with excellent content is by no means the main focus for Google and other search engines; you’ll definitely want to deliver the best web experience possible. This not only involves responsive design with careful attention to buttons, text, formats and font sizes and types, but also involves the web protection.
It’s more than obvious that Google needs stable websites among its top rankings in 2020.
Luckily you have ways to keep bad actors from targeting your online investments. Contact GlobeSEM today for a free consultation to get started on increasing your cybersecurity defense and improving your SEO.