As an SEO, you may develop complacency from the perspective of site security by putting the job entirely on your IT team. Well, it is a debatable matter whether or not you should do it, with a lot depending upon the elements of professionalism and honesty in your IT department. But it is the fact that site security has a huge stake the site’s performance.

That is the reason that SEOs and digital marketers need to be wary of hacking attempts. Hacking is an action carried out by an individual to gain access to a specific website or network without permission. These hacking attempts are made either to gain access to a private portion of the website or to redirect that website’s users to the hacker’s site.

Tools that are utilized by hackers

• The first tool that is widely used by hackers is the malware. The major purpose of a malware is to damage or disable a specific network with a goal being data breach.
• Another way of hacking is spamming. This method involves a hacker adding a hypertext in a website. When users click that hypertext, they are redirected to the hacker’s site. The purpose of this kind of hacking is to use a website’s traffic for the hacker’s site’s advantage.

Effects of hacking

A website might have to suffer significant and far-reaching consequences after it gets hacked. A few things that tend to happen when a website is hacked are worth talking about in this regard.

• According to a research by GoDaddy, about 73% of the hacked websites were hacked with SEO spam being the major reason. While utilization of an authoritative website’s reputation for an increase in traffic and ranking on other website may be one of the reasons, a hacking attempt may deliberately be made to scrape a website off from the higher ranks in SERPs. in many cases, these attempts tend to turn a website into a link farm where users and viewers are tricked into clicking malware links.
• If hacking result in the addition of a malware code in the website, the website becomes unsafe. And if it is identified by Google, it displays a warning when the website’s link is clicked. This warning is displayed for the purpose of keeping users alarmed about the risk. In some cases, the website is removed entirely.
• A high quality and authoritative website would never accept links from low quality websites. The owners of such website can make a hacking attempt to add their backlinks into the authoritative websites which normally have strict rules for the addition of links. The major disadvantage of getting your website hacked this way is that it will not remain trustworthy until you get a clearance after restoring your website and improving its security.

How to prevent getting hacked

There are a few things that you can do to prevent your site from getting hacked.

• First of all, you need to strictly avoid installing plugins from untrustworthy sources. Moreover, you are going to have to keep updating the existing plugins on regular basis to strengthen their security certificates.
• The security of your site is going to be at higher stake if you share a server. Before sharing a server, do proper research about the server security or simply buy a separated server space.
• Make sure that your website’s credentials are secure enough to make the hacking highly difficult. Always use secure passwords to secure your websites.