Following the recent Burj Khalifa Google update, there has been a rise in spam and even hacked content on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Google officials are saying that this sudden increase in malware-infected results is not down to the recent updates that have been undertaken on the Google algorithm. So, what is causing this to happen and why should we be worried about this? Obviously, we should to be worried about this, as no one wants to come back from their weekend off and find out that their website has been compromised by cyber criminals. As well, this is extremely harmful for SEO, as Google penalises your website because of this, and displays a ‘This site may be hacked’ message on your search results. Not only will this affect how many people visit your website, it will also affect your effective SEO, as Google will be reluctant to show results that do not provide users with relevant content, and especially if the content has been hacked in the past.
You may be thinking that this is the end of the world, but if you take the right precautions, you can prevent such events from occurring. In order to keep your SEO effective in the UK and internationally, it is essential to keep your website secure and protected. Using passwords that are easy to guess or used by a lot of different people will put your website at risk from criminals; implementing unique passwords for individual users that access your site, and ensuring that they use a wide range of upper and lower case characters, as well as symbols and numbers, will minimise the risk of having your site compromised.
As well, making sure that your website is regularly backed up on a schedule will minimise the downtime if such an event happened, as well as reduce the stress of content loss. Not only should backups being running, software updates should also be implemented on a regular basis too, so that security is maximised, as software updates will include security upgrades that will fix potential ‘weak points’.
Most importantly, a careful eye should be kept on the websites behaviour and activity, as well as the organic position of the website’s pages; this is so that you are aware of any changes and so you can quickly react to them. That is why here at Innovation Visual, we are dedicated to keeping your website, and therefore organic rankings safe from those who wish to do your business harm. If you would like to find out more about how we can help you, please get in touch.