How Website Security Impacts Google Rankings and Customer Trust

Malware and the Risk of Google Deindexing

When Google's automated systems detect malware on your website, the consequences are swift and severe. Your search listings may be flagged with 'This site may be hacked' or 'This site may harm your computer' warnings, which effectively eliminates click-throughs from search results.

In more serious cases, Google may partially or fully deindex your website. This means your pages are removed from search results entirely — not pushed down to page 5, but removed. For a business that relies on organic traffic, deindexing is the equivalent of your storefront disappearing from the street.

The deindexing process can happen quickly, but recovery is slow. Even after you clean the malware and submit a reconsideration request through Search Console, it can take weeks for Google to re-crawl your site, verify the cleanup, and restore your listings. During that period, you are invisible to everyone searching for your products or services.

The compounding effect is particularly damaging. While your site is deindexed, competitors absorb your traffic. When you are restored, you often do not return to the same rankings — you have to rebuild authority and trust signals that eroded during the outage. Months of SEO work can be undone by a single security incident.

Downtime, Engagement Signals, and Search Performance

Website downtime caused by security incidents — whether from a DDoS attack, server compromise, or the need to take the site offline during cleanup — sends negative signals to both search engines and users.

When Googlebot attempts to crawl your site and encounters errors, it reduces crawl frequency. If the downtime is extended, Google may temporarily remove cached versions of your pages from results. When the site comes back online, it takes time for normal crawl patterns to resume.

User engagement metrics are also affected. If visitors land on your site and encounter error pages, slow load times caused by injected scripts, or security warnings, they bounce immediately. High bounce rates and low engagement signal to Google that your site is not providing a good experience, which can suppress rankings even after the security issue is resolved.

For businesses running Google Ads, downtime is doubly expensive. You are paying for clicks that land on error pages, wasting ad spend while simultaneously damaging your Quality Score. A lower Quality Score means higher costs per click going forward — a financial penalty that persists long after the downtime ends.

HTTPS, Trust Signals, and Conversion Rates

HTTPS is the baseline security expectation for any business website in 2026. Google confirmed HTTPS as a ranking signal over a decade ago, and modern browsers actively warn users when they are on an HTTP page, especially if that page contains forms.

The trust impact goes beyond SEO. Research consistently shows that visitors are significantly more likely to complete a purchase, fill out a contact form, or provide personal information when they see the padlock icon in their browser. For ecommerce sites, the absence of visible security indicators directly reduces conversion rates.

But HTTPS alone is not enough. An SSL certificate that has expired, is misconfigured, or uses a weak encryption standard can trigger browser warnings that are even more alarming to visitors than having no SSL at all. A full-page 'Your connection is not private' warning will cause the vast majority of visitors to leave immediately.

Extended Validation (EV) certificates, security trust badges, and clear privacy policy links all contribute to the overall trust environment. While none of these are direct Google ranking factors, they influence user behaviour — and user behaviour metrics do affect rankings indirectly.

Building a Combined Security and SEO Strategy

The most effective approach treats security and SEO as complementary disciplines rather than separate silos. Many of the actions that improve security also improve SEO performance, and vice versa.

Page speed optimisation is a clear example. Removing unnecessary scripts, ensuring your site loads efficiently, and using a CDN all improve both security (by reducing attack surface and improving resilience) and SEO (through better Core Web Vitals scores).

Regular content audits serve both purposes. From an SEO perspective, you are pruning low-quality content and ensuring every page serves a purpose. From a security perspective, you are identifying orphan pages, outdated software, and forgotten landing pages that could serve as attack vectors.

Structured data, clean sitemaps, and proper robots.txt configuration help search engines crawl your site efficiently while also ensuring that hidden spam pages injected by attackers are more quickly identified as anomalies.

Monitoring tools that track both rankings and security provide the most comprehensive view. A sudden drop in rankings combined with an increase in indexed pages you did not create is a strong indicator of an SEO spam injection — something that shows up clearly when you are watching both dimensions.

What This Means for Your Business

If you are investing in SEO but ignoring security, you are building on an unstable foundation. A single security incident can wipe out months of organic growth and cost far more to recover from than it would have cost to prevent.

Conversely, if you have strong security but are not monitoring its SEO implications, you may be missing early warning signs that something is wrong. Google Search Console is as much a security monitoring tool as it is an SEO tool.

The businesses that consistently perform well in search treat their website as a single system where security, performance, content, and user experience reinforce each other. This integrated approach is both more effective and more efficient than managing each area in isolation.

When This Advice May Not Apply

If your business does not rely on organic search traffic — for example, if you operate entirely through referrals, offline channels, or a closed client network — the SEO dimension of security is less relevant. However, the customer trust and data protection aspects still apply.

Businesses using fully managed platforms like Shopify or Squarespace benefit from platform-level security that reduces (but does not eliminate) the risk of server-level compromises. The SEO monitoring recommendations still apply, as third-party app vulnerabilities and content injection can occur on any platform.

If your website is purely informational with no forms, no ecommerce, and no customer data collection, the security risk profile is lower. However, even static sites can be compromised through hosting vulnerabilities, and the reputational damage from Google flagging your site applies regardless of the site's functionality.