Website is hosted on internet and is available for public access. The very purpose of creating it is to reach more and more people. As it is publically available asset, there is flip side to it. Anyone from internet with malicious intention may be able to harm it if not taken due care. We know that there are people called hackers whose aim is to break into the website. It can be easily understood that website functionality would be affected. But it is has other repercussions too. Website security affects SEO and your page rank.
https rather than http
You are new in online business and trying to establish your position in the market. Someone comes to your website. He/She opens it in Chrome browser to see “Not secure” message. What you believe the person would do? Will he not be scared? There are high chances that he may not even come back to your website. You have permanently lost a customer. You must have your website on https rather than http.
Google also doesnot want to send the searchers to a site which is not secure. Hence, https is one of the factor in page ranking algorithm. In this way, website security affects SEO.
Website security affects SEO: impact of Blacklisting
If you are not taking appropriate measures to protect the website, there is always a chance that it may become victim to a security attack. Let me tell you something interesting why the websites are hacked.
SEO professionals want to garner ‘back links’ to improve website ranking. It is important to have good back links from reputed sites. Someone with malicious intention can hack your website, just to add backlinks and thereby boost his SEO.
More often than not, these links are from websites with which you would never like to associate with. Search engine can treat this a spam and may blacklist your site. This would impact your ranking. It takes all more efforts to get to the original ranking again.
Website security and Customer perception
Customer perception is everything in online business. Customers trusting you with their valuable personal information like bank account details, credit/debit card numbers, address details and so on. They should feel that your website is authentic and would provide them what is being claimed by it in terms of offering. As a result, they would be comfortable in sharing the sensitive details with you to continue the business.
We are putting so much of effort and budget on creating sound search engine optimization (SEO) strategy and paid marketing campaigns. It is rather important as sanity check to make sure that your website is secure enough.
Loophole in security is not damaging only with respect to SEO or marketing strategy.
Sometimes because of the attack your website can go completely offline, it becomes unreachable. This can cost a lot in terms of brand reputation. Due to unreachable website, opportunities for conversions and sales both are lost. This may have a major financial impact.
If you have any security related issues or confusion call Magicworkshost. We have fixed many such concerns about website security in the past.
