Safeguarding Web Security Without Sacrificing SEO

With cyber threats constantly evolving, companies must balance optimizing search engines with safeguarding their sites and data. This article explores why Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and cybersecurity go hand in hand, providing best practices for securing websites against malicious bots, negative SEO, and other attacks. Whether you own a website or run a digital marketing agency that carries out SEO for clients, you must maintain heightened vigilance to ensure that they are adequately protected against attacks from malicious competitors and other entities. Cybercriminals never stop innovating new ways to exploit websites.

Why SEO And Cybersecurity Must Go Hand In Hand

In this section, we are going to look at why SEO and cybersecurity must be viewed as interconnected priorities for every website owner and webmaster.

1. Google has made it clear that a website’s security influences its search position [1]. Sites that fail to meet basic security standards like HTTPS, data encryption, and malware protection may rank lower as a result. While security is just one of many factors in ranking, it’s too important to overlook.
2. A compromised, insecure website convinces browsers and search engines that it’s untrustworthy. That results in cautionary messages that discourage visitors and convert them into bounces. Even visitors who ignore the warnings may feel uneasy using the site, hampering engagement.
3. Website data breaches lead to the exfiltration of sensitive customer, financial, or intellectual property information. The resulting expenses for legal action, compensation, and fines lead to direct money loss. Breach investigation, mitigation efforts, and potential customer loss also drain funds.
4. Website security breaches can severely damage brand reputation and customer trust. Current customers may lose faith in the brand’s ability to safeguard their data. Potential customers may steer clear of doing business. This erosion of trust cripples the brand’s potential for long-term success.
5. Even if your content marketing strategy is excellent, one of the signs that a site might be compromised is that its speed becomes slow, leading to frustration for visitors. Also, security flaws like malware lead to poor experiences, higher bounce rates, and less time on the site. Search engines factor those metrics into rankings and they will negatively affect the site.

Be Wary Of Negative SEO

Attacks against a website might be manifestations of negative SEO, which occurs when unethical practices are employed to damage a competitor’s search engine rankings and presence intentionally. Examples include spamming their site with bad backlinks from low-quality sources, scraping and reposting their content, falsifying DMCA takedown requests, and other “black hat” tactics. The aim is to impact the innocent website’s standings in Google and other search engines, leading to major declines in organic traffic and revenue.

As you watch out against cybersecurity attacks, you must be particularly careful of malicious competitors who want to take advantage of your vulnerabilities. Some warning signs your site may be a victim of negative SEO include sudden, unnatural drops in rankings, manual actions or warnings in Google Search Console, a spike in poor quality backlinks, and content duplication issues.

“One way to protect your website from such assaults is through the disavow tool [2], which allows webmasters to identify bad backlinks pointing to their site and request Google ignore them for ranking assessments. After all, backlinks are a major factor Google considers in ranking websites,” says Daniel Moayanda, SEO consultant and founder of TheSEOCapital. “If you have many malicious or low-quality backlinks pointing to your website without disavowing them, Google will consider a manual action against your website”, he says. You can specify which pages or domains to disavow by saving the following information into a text file that will be uploaded to Google:

# Two pages to disavow

http://spam.example.com/stuff/comments.html

http://spam.example.com/stuff/paid-links.html

# One domain to disavow

domain:shadyseo.com

Best Practices For Comprehensive Website Security

There are many layers to building comprehensive security for modern websites and web applications. This section outlines some best practices that create a strong overall security posture.

1. Secure Coding Practices

Developers should adhere to secure coding guidelines and principles like input validation, the principle of least privilege, encryption of sensitive data, proper error handling, etc. This lays the foundation for an application’s security posture.

2. Leverage A Web Application Firewall

Installing a web application firewall (WAF) provides an extra layer of protection by filtering incoming traffic for common attacks like cross-site scripting, SQL injection, etc. A WAF can identify and block threats that get past other defenses.

3. Strong Access Controls

Authentication and authorization mechanisms like multifactor authentication, strict password policies, and limiting admin/root access prevent unauthorized system access. The principle of least privilege should also be followed.

4. Monitor For Suspicious Activity

SIEM tools, intrusion detection systems, and other monitoring solutions let you identify anomalous behaviors like increased failed logins, traffic from suspicious IPs, etc., so you can respond quickly.

5. Use A Secure Content Management System

Content management systems like WordPress and Joomla should be kept updated and all plug-ins/add-ons vetted. Unnecessary modules should be removed to reduce the attack surface area.

6. Validate User Input

All user-controllable input should be sanitized and validated server-side before processing to prevent OS command and SQL injection, cross-site scripting, and other injection attacks.

7. Regular Security Audits

Schedule frequent vulnerability assessments, penetration tests, source code audits, and compliance audits to find weak spots proactively. Security should be continuously assessed.

8. Disaster Recovery Plans

Have tested backup and recovery procedures in place in case of outages, data loss, ransomware attacks, or other crises. This builds resilience.

The Challenge Of Malicious Bots For SEO And Cybersecurity

Not all bots are malicious. Some are harmless and even helpful for SEO, like search engine bots that index pages. So, despite many websites suffering from the challenge of malicious bots, distinguishing good bots from bad is often difficult, even though it is critical. Cybercriminals often disguise malicious bots as legitimate to evade detection while scraping and mirroring content, overloading resources, and spreading malware. Here are some ways to defend against malicious bots:

• Implement bot detection tools like reCAPTCHA, fingerprinting, behavior analysis, or IP reputation data to identify and filter bot traffic.
• Monitor site analytics for spikes in traffic, 404 errors, or other anomalies indicative of bots.
• Use rate limiting and load balancing to manage bot resource demands.
• Validate forms and user input to stop bot submission abuse.
• Incorporate intrusion detection and web application firewalls to block bot-driven attacks.
• Stay up to date on evolving bots and cybercrime tactics.

Conclusion

In summary, SEO and cybersecurity share the common goal of delivering safe, positive User Experiences. While search optimization focuses on improving visibility, cybersecurity aims to protect site infrastructure and user data. By implementing strong security controls and monitoring for anomalies, companies can both rank highly and maintain visitor trust.

References:

[1] HTTPS as a ranking signal

[2] Disavow links to your site