10 Tips to Protect Your Website from Hacking and Google Penalties

As an SEO professional, you wouldn’t ever want to receive this notification on your Google Search Console dashboard saying: “This site may not perform as well in Google results because it appears to be in violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.” Most webmasters use the Google search console for monitoring their website traffic, optimizing the search rankings, and making informed decisions to improve the visibility of their website on the Google search engine. As site admins, they also monitor and in some cases resolve server errors as well as security issues like hacking and malware and make sure that their website remains online without any interruption. We wrote this article to help you out with the prevention tips for protecting your website against common security threats and Google penalties that can critically hurt your SEO or can also lead to a data breach. As we are all aware of the fact that hackers are proactively performing cyber-attacks and exploiting vulnerabilities in the websites – world over. Webmasters must also take appropriate actions to prevent such parameters that can cause serious outages to their websites. The search engine Google says – The number of incidents of hacked sites increased by 32% in 2016) compared to 2015 – a figure it expects to rise this year as hackers are more aggressive, sites are becoming outdated and the cybercriminals are quicker to take advantage of those poorly taken security measures. Google recently launched this social campaign/update named #NoHacked 3.0to to bring hacking awareness to the marketing professionals and also provided tips for Webmasters to keep their websites safe from hackers. The update also confirmed the three most common types of hack your website can experience:

1. The Gibberish Hack: A hack that creates multiple new pages within a website, each filled with nonsense text or keywords. These hacked pages will be redirected to any third-party website- possibly one with adult content, allowing the hack to hijack the website’s traffic.
2. Japanese Keywords Hack: It is similar to the Gibberish Hack except the new pages will contain the keywords in the Japanese language and will be listed in the unknown directories filled with affiliate links. The hacker will sometimes lock out the real site owner’s Search Console account and will add themselves as a fake site owner.
3. Cloaked Keywords Hack: This type of hack can also create multiple new pages on the website filled with malicious text, links, and images. This hack is also able to make use of the website’s original template to build a similar malicious page that will contain the malicious keywords which are clocked.

We listed here a few tips to protect your website from Hacking and avoid Google penalties for your SEO: 1) Set up Search Console (Google webmaster) for your site: You will receive an email or a notification on your search console dashboard if:

1. Your website is being attacked by malware
2. Your pages are not indexed
3. You have server connectivity problems

When Google notices a site has been hacked it notifies the owner or webmaster through the Search Console. Are you connected to the Search Console? If not, then you won’t get these alerts and your site may go undetected until someone contacts you to let you know. 2) Back up your site regularly: This is one of the most effective ways to recover your website. If you have a backup of your site, it will be easier to revert it to its original state prior to getting hacked. 3) Keep plugins updated: If you are using CMS like WordPress or Joomla then making all plugins up to date is a good way to keep your website secure. Because outdated plugins are easily vulnerable and an attacker can easily exploit the vulnerabilities within them. 4) Offer rich content: Make sure there is rich, useful, engaging, and unique content present on your website. Also, check for duplicate content, there are so many free online tools available for checking content duplicacy. If most of the content is duplicated, there is a big possibility that your website will be penalized. 5) Use SSL (HTTPS) on your website: If you want your website to be loved by Google, then you should enable SSL on your website and it can help to keep your data encrypted and secure. 6) Invest in security software: If you are not an expert in the security aspects and think that you need an extra layer of protection for your website, you should invest in security software that will take care of your website for you. You can also install a web application firewall in front of your website which is capable of defending your website against a variety of cyber threats. 7) Check webmaster guidelines: Check specific webmaster guidelines and pay close attention to the Quality Guidelines of Google Webmaster tools that can help you out with tips to protect your website from Google penalties. 8) Remove bad backlinks: You should also create a list of the bad backlinks that are linking to your website and then remove those bad links to improve your website’s SEO. You can use Google’s Link Disavow Tool if you want to check the SEO spam guidelines and policies for Google link penalties. 9) Remove the auto-fill form: Make sure you do not leave auto-fill enabled for the forms that are present on your website (ex: Contact form, Feedback form, etc.). 10) Regularly check logs for any suspicious activity: You should periodically check the website traffic logs if you suspect any unusual behavior on your website or you can do weekly website audits to make sure that it is not vulnerable but safe for you as well as your users. Key Takeaway:

• Make Web Security a Priority
• Create email alerts from Google Webmaster Tools
• Follow Webmaster Guidelines
• Implement a robust security solution