SEO Report – Website Security

Taking care of your website isn’t all SEO and content and linking and site architecture. You also have to look into one of the more crucial aspects when it comes to how your website’s interaction with the outside world – and that means website security. While website security is not directly linked to your site’s SEO,it certainly can affect the traffic rate to your websites. Online users should feel comfortable and safe using your websites. If they don’t, they will hesitate to visit your website and this can create an insurmountable obstacle to your sales plans.

When your website is not secure, others can take advantage of the loopholes in your website’s security and use it for their own purposes. They can install scripts or malicious software that will attack any innocent user who visits your website, infecting their computers with viruses or spyware that will be installed remotely and turn their personal computers into spam generation machines.

If your website hosts such malicious programs or software, or even if it is suspected of hosting such harmful programs, then people will report you. Since Google in particular takes such issues very seriously, they will attempt to alert innocent users and prevent them from walking in to such a trap by displaying a notice stating that your website may harm their computers. You can expect to see your traffic dwindle to nothing after such a notice is associated with your website. since no one in their right mind will visit your website after reading such a clear warning.

This means that all the money that you have spent on your website and all your SEO efforts will be ruined – just because your website’s security has been compromised. All of your work getting to top positions in Google can be in jeopardy just because of your success – people are ready to spend a lot of money to reach the top positions, and some have no scruples against hiring hackers to sabotage their competitors. If you have made your way to top ranking, then you need to be all the more careful because hackers target such sites – even if they aren’t hired to do so, because top ranking means your site has high visibility and only such sites can spread the hackers desired malicious software quickly to thousands of users.

It can be very frustrating to work so hard to get top rankings in Google and other major search engines only to become a target for hackers to plant their malicious programs in your site. Paying attention to your website’s security by hiring professionals to check your website’s security or using programs that scan for intrusion and alert you in case your site is hacked can help you guard yourself and your visitors.

If the worst happens and you wake one morning to find that Google has indeed posted one of those notices for your website, do not panic. Simply take the necessary steps to get the warning removed by attending to your website’s security issues. You can check for such a warning by simply conducting a search for your own site on Google at periodic intervals to ensure you have not been reported for malicious activity.