How Website Security Can Affect Your Rankings

Is web security part of your SEO strategy? If the answer is no, you may want to change this and make it part of your policy. Malicious bots and hackers can get your site penalized if you aren’t paying attention to certain aspects of your SEO. If your site is targeted and attacked, it may lead to a manual penalty from Google, which removes your site from the index.

You can’t wait for this to happen. It’s imperative that you become proactive and do all that you can to help stop your site from being attacked due to a vulnerability.

Attacks From Malicious Bots

Google likes it when you create new content on your website. They’ll send out their bots to crawl the information you post so that it can be indexed. However, some bots crawl your site for nefarious reasons. They may want to see if your site is vulnerable to an attack or steal your content and put it on their own website.

Check Your Backlinks And Log Files

To combat this, you’ll need to take a manual look at the backlinks associated with your site. If you find any of your content that has been stolen and placed on a spam site without your permission, file a DMCA complaint and send it to Google. It’s also important to block any malicious traffic by analyzing your log files on a periodic basis. You can use a tool such as AWStats to assist you with this. It will list the bots that have crawled your site and indicate their total number of hits as well as the bandwidth that’s been consumed. Be sure to block the access of these bots.

Keep WordPress Plug-ins Current

Another key factor in making sure that your website security is the best that it can be is by keeping both WordPress and any plug-ins that you use up to date. While tools like WordPress are excellent for building a website and keeping it updated with content, using such a popular CMS can lead to more vulnerability, which is often attacked by hackers. They look for areas to exploit, which means that you must always try to be one step ahead of them. Hackers are always looking for outdated plug-ins. You may want to monitor your WordPress website by utilizing security plug-ins like Sucuri Security and All in One. These WordPress plug-ins have the ability to monitor and scan your data for the purpose of finding a potential hacking event.

Make sure that you invest the time needed to keep all of your plug-ins updated and your backlinks clean. This will ensure that your site isn’t a vulnerable target that’s susceptible to being delisted.