Cyber Security Issues: A Hidden Threat to Your SEO Rankings and Online Visibility

Online security breaches have become dangerously common in recent years. Did you know that they increased by a whopping 41% in 2022? Tech giants like Target, Twitter, Apple, and Yahoo have been victims of cybercrime too.

Unfortunately, it isn’t just big companies that are being targeted. Small businesses are actually more vulnerable, as statistics show that 46% of all security breaches affect businesses with fewer than 1,000 employees.

In September 2022, hackers accessed and compromised around 35 million files from different companies, that included highly sensitive data and flagship assets. The consequences of such a breach can be devastating for any business, big or small.

One particular area of concern is intellectual property theft, which has become a major part of the cybercrime ecosystem. In fact, companies in the US alone lose $600 billion every year due to IP theft.

So, if you think cybersecurity isn’t a big deal, think again.

The stakes are high, and the potential consequences are dire. These security issues can cause financial and reputational damage to your business.

This isn’t where the story ends.

Cybersecurity issues can impact your SEO performance too.

From a potential fall in ranking to website hacks, cybersecurity issues can lead to spammy links that impact your pages’ visibility—and ultimately hinder your business’ growth.

This is why it’s crucial to be proactive about website security to prevent malicious website exploitation.

Let’s take a closer look at how cybersecurity is closely linked to your SEO performance and why you should devise an effective cybersecurity plan to rank higher in SERPs.

Understanding the Relationship Between Cybersecurity Issues And Your SEO Performance

55% of US consumers are less likely to continue with a business that has experienced a  security breach.

As a small business, increasing your credibility, reputation, and trustworthiness is one of the most essential rules for dominating Google SERPs and attracting more customers.

How can you achieve that? By shielding your website from SEO spam attacks.

Hackers use a range of ways to launch SEO spam attacks. One of the most common methods is inserting malicious links into your existing web pages or creating a new web page with spammy content and malicious links.

The more well-protected your website is, the more robust your online presence will be.

5 Ways CyberSecurity Issues Affect Your SEO Performance

1. ‘Unsafe’ Sites Can be Penalized by Search Engines

Robust website security is a major ranking factor, especially since it helps websites gain a competitive edge. When creating the search ranking algorithm, every reputable search engine prioritizes site security and accounts for whether a connection is encrypted or not.

The HTTPS at the beginning of your web address shows search engines that the connection to your website is encrypted, and users can browse it safely.

To obtain an HTTPS connection, you will require an SSL certificate (Secure Sockets Layer) which provides authentication and privacy to Internet communication. With this encryption-based Internet security certificate, you can increase your click-through rate and foster brand trust.

Without an HTTPS connection, your business will likely rank low on Google SERPs, and users may be hesitant about visiting your website.

2. Crawling Errors

A major portion of website traffic comes from bots like scraper bots and spider bots. These bots scan the web to analyze and classify information to the index of the search engine.

While these don’t pose any security risk, it is believed that more than a quarter of web traffic is made of ‘bad bots’ instead of ‘good bots.’

Bad bots serve a more nefarious purpose since they can be used within a wide botnet to deliver a DDOS attack against your organization. A DDOS obstructs the traffic of a targeted server, network, or service by flooding it with unwanted Internet traffic.

This unwanted traffic from bots and spiders can also result in:

• Confusing reports
• Increased bandwidth costs
• Misattribution in Google Analytics

Other forms of threats also include data extraction and denial of service.

In addition to that, continuous visits from bad bots can even hinder legitimate search engine bots from crawling your site. This can be damaging to your website, especially for small businesses, as search engines need to crawl your website to have your web pages show up in SERPs.

You might start noticing 503 or 404 errors in Search Console when this happens for web pages that aren’t even missing. These errors mean a website server is unable to find the page the user is trying to access—aka—the browser successfully connected to the website server, but the host couldn’t find the requested source.

This means Google tried crawling the page, but your server showed them as missing.

3. Extended Website Downtime

Website downtime can hurt your website’s search engine rankings. Even a few minutes of downtime can signal to Google that your website is unreliable, which can impact your ranking in search results.

Extended downtime periods can significantly impact your search ranking, even after the downtime has been remedied. If your site is going through an unplanned downtime while Googlebot is trying to crawl it, it will automatically receive 500 HTTP code errors.

While this might not be an issue initially, repetitive encounters with a 500 error because of prolonged downtime can harm your ranking.

4. Negative SEO

Someone out there might be using underhanded tactics to hurt your rankings in SERPs. This is Negative SEO.

There are various forms of negative SEO attacks, like:

• Creating fake social profiles to hurt your online reputation: A well-maintained social media profile is essential for your brand’s credibility. Fake social profiles with your company’s name can hurt your online presence and even be used to spread fake news and false information about you.
• Copying your original content and distributing it over the internet: Parts of your website can be duplicated and spread across the internet. Without original content, your search rankings will quickly plummet, and all of your carefully devised SEO strategies might go down the drain.

• Removing the most effective backlinks from your website: Some negative SEO experts can even have positive backlinks removed from your website.

The truth is negative SEO threats are more real than you think. Several people have even succeeded with the technique.

Here is a Fiverr user offering negative SEO services:

And this was an answer posted in a Google Search Console Help Center when the user came across a hacked website:

This is why it’s essential to safeguard your business from cybersecurity issues with an effective action plan before your online visibility takes a hit due to negative SEO.

5. Spammy Backlinks

Toxic and spammy backlinks can affect your website’s reputation.

This is because most of these links originate from black hat SEO tactics, and Google can penalize sites that are using unethical techniques to rank higher.

An SEO spam attack typically creates numerous backlinks to a fraudulent website to inflate its search visibility.

Here are some signs that indicate your business has gone through an SEO spam attack:

• Your links redirect to unknown sites in the search results: Toxic backlinks and spammy links from untrustworthy sites on your webpage can lead to penalization by Google.
• Strange links appear in your content: Negative SEO practitioners can hack your site and insert links leading to compromised websites to hurt your ranking.

Recommended read: White Hat vs. Black Hat Link Building

• Content in different languages shows up on your site: An SEO spam attack can mess with your site content and change it into different languages that will immediately affect your ranking. If a user has English as their preferred language, Google will consider this preference when showing search results.

Hire Search Berg Professional SEO Services To Secure High SERP Rankings

Although there aren’t any foolproof ways to prevent the likelihood of becoming a victim of these ever-evolving cyberattacks, you can take certain steps to minimize the chances of this happening.

Get in touch with our team for expert SEO services so you can shield your business from all forms of online threats. Check out our services to get started right now.