It is vital for your website to have strong web security if you want to do well in SEO.
We need to understand that Google is focused on not only delivering high-quality, relevant search results, but also on protecting people from malware and unscrupulous websites. Not only that, a hack of your website by others can give Google false information that directly impacts your rankings.
Hacking attempts at your website, can keep Google’s bots from accessing your site and assessing your content and keywords. Your server may report missing pages to Google because of a web scraper or hacker impacting your website.
It is quite usual that hackers would want to do some back-door SEO there. For instance, they may want to put a link on your site, or add a web page.
There are two common approaches attackers use to inject SEO spam on websites:
• Injecting HTML code for concealed elements in theme files
• Injecting fake spam posts in the WordPress database
Sometimes they even target your domain and redirect it to another site altogether. All CMS-based based websites, which use Wordpress, Drupal, Wix, WooCommerce, Joomla, etc frequently face such attacks. These attacks make your website look like an untrustworthy page, or may even draw penalties from Google that cause your site to be blacklisted.
Sometimes you find that your ranking in SERPs is not improving a bit, even after making an huge effort of SEO by you. Then you better look for some injection at your website.
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WHAT CAN YOU DO TO PROTECT YOUR WEBSITE?You can do many things. I am hereby giving you a brief overview of that:
1.
One of the first things you need to do to protect your website and boost your Google ranking is to install HTTPS.
You’ll need to make sure you have a proper certificate and allow indexing so that Google can still read your website.
An HTTPS setup does not secure a website, it only secures the connection and encrypts data that is sent. That means that communication between your server and the web browser a visitor is using is secure and data — like a credit card number used for purchase — cannot be stolen.
However, this is only the beginning.
2.
You should go ahead and practice all the best practices of Information Security. For example, do everything possible to protect the information of your website users/customers.
3.
Go ahead and research on what is the degree of security that is maintained by your webhosting company.
4.
Next, you must install plugins that address the known security issues in the platform you use, whether it is Joomla or Wordpress, it does not matter. Use security software or plugins as appropriate. For smaller websites using WordPress, you can use Wordfence, iThemes Security, or Bulletproof Security, for example.
All websites can also benefit from using 'SiteLock Security', which not only closes security loopholes but also monitors your website daily for malware, viruses, and more. Sitelock provides protection to your website from malicious attacks, spammers and hackers. It is an automatic monitoring tool that guards your site against landing on search engine blacklists, detects malware and protects you from costly downtime.
5.
Use a truly secure password and consider using software such as a password manager if accessibility is a concern.
6.
Use automated backups. Automated backups make it easy to recover your site to its original condition quickly, which may allow you to dodge Google penalties. In case if some attack happens or other problem occurs, then you won't have to frantically reconstruct your website.
Automatic backups mean you don’t have to remember to manually back up your website each week or month. It will give you peace of mind and make it simple to resume business as usual, even if a breach occurs. Most web hosting companies offer automatic backup services, so it’s possible all you need to do is configure it. If you use WordPress, there are plugins that schedule automatic backups as well. I have my own website in Joomla and use Akeeba Backup and Restore component for this purpose.
7.
One of the most common sources of website breaches come from SQL injections into web forms that don’t have strict enough parameters. Any time you allow someone to supply outside information, it’s important to secure the form.
There are several steps you can take to prevent a SQL injection, so be sure you’ve covered your bases. I am not going into details of what all you can do to prevent SQL injection. But you can do a lot to stop it. For instance, you can use prepared statements so that a user cannot insert malicious values directly into the backend of your website. You can also limit user input so that it can only be of a specific type and length, which helps you avoid coded attacks. Another idea is to create a generic error message so that hackers cannot use the codes to learn about your database architecture.
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Keeping your website safe is already a top priority in most businesses. What you might not realize is that great security helps protect your search engine ranking as well.
With the right security in place, you’re much less likely to suffer a hack that compromises your website. If there is a concern, implementing the right safeguards and backups will help you to quickly recover and submit your website for reconsideration, hopefully avoiding any hefty drops in your SERP rankings.
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Please let me know of what do you think about this in the comment section. You can also share with all if the information shared here helps you in some manner.
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