Live ChatScanning your website regularly can help you in protecting it from attack from malicious elements. If your website is not perceived as secure and safe by your users, it can affect traffic adversely. If you are the owner of a commercial website, not scanning and securing your website can have disastrous consequences on your business prospects. It can also send your ranking plunging southwards.
Here are the ways your website can get affected if you don’t scan it regularly:
Negative SEO:
Negative SEO is a practice indulged in by unscrupulous competitors. Technically, the process is called Black Hat SEO and is an illegal practice which involves building harmful backlinks. Hackers and SEO specialists with bad intent can do this to your website and the consequences can be disastrous.
Malicious Attacks:
Almost all websites are susceptible to attack from hackers. Just because your website does not have any invaluable data worth stealing does not mean it won’t be attacked. Not all hackers attack a website for pocketing personal data and building backlinks. Many do it for fun and to show off their hacking prowess. Your website is not safe from such malicious attacks unless you fully secure it.
Website Errors and Outdated Codes:
The performance of your website can be affected adversely if you are using outdated plugins that may have errors and some negative functions that can make your website vulnerable to attacks. It can also make your website excruciatingly slow which can affect user experience and can potentially have a negative effect on rankings.
Scanning your website regularly can help you identify if these negative factors are affecting your website. You can take timely and effective action to prevent the situation from getting worse.
Protecting Website from Negative SEO
To check if your website has been hit by any malicious elements or virus, you must monitor your Google Search Console account on a regular basis. It is acclaimed as one of the best ways to identify risks. You must also analyze and monitor your Google Analytics data frequently. A sharp and sudden drop in Google search traffic might indicate the presence of malicious codes. Remember, traffic and ranking may also get affected if Google Webmaster Guidelines are violated. Before initiating action, make sure you identify the real cause.
Fixing Impact of Negative SEO
It is important that you fully secure your server before you begin fixing malicious attacks on your website. If your website is hosted on a secure server, your site won’t be vulnerable to attacks. Make sure that your site is hosted on a reliable and reputed web hosting provider to prevent attackers from trying their hacking skills on your website.
These are the steps you can initiate to deter attackers:
Remove Spammy Backlinks
You are most likely to discover a number of harmful backlinks if your website is affected by negative SEO. There are tools available online to find out these bad links and get a detailed list of all of them sitting on your website. You can also get rid of them by the following methods:
• Send an email requesting the website owners to remove the link, clearly indicating that both the parties can be vulnerable to attacks because of these links.
• If the website owners do not comply, you can disavow them through the Google Search Console.
• Redistributing your content all over the web can also hurt your rankings. Use software systems available to ensure your content is not copied and posted on other websites.
Sending thousands of requests to your server simultaneously could bring your site down. A major drop in site speed could indicate spam attacks. Monitor the speed and uptime of your website using the appropriate tools.
WordPress is a popular target for hackers because of its high popularity and usage.Unless you regularly monitor your WordPress website for malicious attacks and take corrective actions, your website can be a vulnerable target.
Always install a free theme or a plug-in only from the official WordPress directories. If you are installing one from outside the official directory, check for potentially malicious code before installing it on your production site. There are free scanning sites which can check your website for virus and malware and alert you if there are any present.
You can use these tools to determine if the plugins you intend to use are safe and authentic:
Theme Authenticity Checker:
The free plugin that scans your theme files for potentially malicious code.
Exploit Scanner
This is a free plugin that also searches the posts and comments tables of the database of your WordPress install for anything suspicious.
The information provided will help you detect suspicious activities on your website without having to consult or spend money on professionals. Scanning your website regularly can help detect malicious files and unknown activities easily.
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