This article was written by Jason Kennedy for JasonIT, a trusted IT partner of BeKonstructive Marketing specialising in IT services and website hosting. While these areas sit outside our core services, we regularly collaborate to ensure our clients’ websites are supported by strong technical foundations. We’ve shared this article to provide additional insight into an area that plays an important role in SEO and overall website performance.
Technical Health Builds Search Trust
When Google ranks websites, it is not only evaluating content and all the wonderful SEO strategies in place, but also assessing the technical integrity of the website itself.
Security vulnerabilities, broken pages, downtime, or hacked content can all signal risk to search engines. You could have the most optimised, eye-catching, content driven SEO based website of all time… however it would significantly drop in search ranking if the website had a critical error – all that investment and momentum gone to waste.
Why?
The same reason we stop referring people to others after we ourselves have a bad experience.
If a website is slow, insecure, frequently offline, or compromised by spam or malware, it signals risk, both for users and for search engines. How does it know when your website is in a compromised state? By regularly checking your website with Robots! (Not terminator style though, more like little programs traversing the big wide web, documenting everything they see). It goes something like this:
- Googles web crawlers visits your website
- They document everything they see
- Content
- Links
- SEO Reputation
- But also…errors and/or security concerns,
- If your website is not healthy, they report back to Google advising that your website shouldn’t recommend it to anyone at the moment.
- Your website stays in this recommended state until the crawlers come back to check later.
Unfortunately, restoring your reputation back can take up to three (3) months (Which for some web heavy businesses could be serious revenue!) For this reason, the websites that perform best over time are usually those that not only have effective SEO, but are actively maintained behind the scenes.
Security Signals: Why Google Prioritises Safe Websites
Google’s primary goal is not just to return the best search results to you, it’s also to protect you from harmful content. Sending people to compromised websites damages trust in search results, which is simply bad business. Because of this, websites with poor security can be flagged, penalised, or in extreme cases – removed from search results entirely!
The most common turn offs for our little web crawler friends are:
- Malware injections
- SEO spam attacks
- Hidden redirect scripts
- Compromised plugins or themes
- Backdoor access left by attackers
Many business owners are unaware when this happens as some of these vulnerabilities are hidden from human view and are only ‘seen’ by crawlers looking at your website. In some cases, spam pages can exist for months before they are discovered by a human, and that’s where reputation damage can be a challenge to recover.
Case Study: There was a local Brisbane based business that noticed their emails were bouncing to their clients, a lot. They engaged JasonIT to investigate with email delivery and unfortunately as part of this investigation, we confirmed their website had been compromised, which saw overseas spammers using the businesses email account to send A LOT of spam and phishing attacks to anyone with an email address. Unfortunately their website was compromised for some time and Google blacklisted their domain, permanently blocking them from ever sending an email to anyone with a gmail account. The only solution moving forward was a complete company rebrand and a fresh domain name… ouch!!
How do you reduce the risk of this occurring and limit the severity? Regular Website Maintenance.
Software Updates: More Than Just Clicking “Update”
Maintaining a high performing website isn’t just about clicking the update button every time you get a notification. It includes a whole scope of activities to ensure all search engines keep recommending your website in their search results.
In additional to keeping your website updated, maintenance also includes:
- Malware scanning and removal
- Web application firewall (WAF) protection
- Blocking brute-force login attempts
- Monitoring for suspicious file changes
- Keeping core, plugins, and themes updated
- Uptime monitoring to detect outages quickly
- SSL certificate monitoring and auto-renewal
- Monitoring and fixing broken links and 404 errors
- Page speed and performance monitoring
- Regular automated backups with quick restoration capability
However it’s worth noting that even simple updates must be managed carefully. Blindly updating everything at once can break functionality and cause more issues than the update fixes, which is why it’s so important for websites to undergo their testing in a staging environment (a carbon copy of your website) before applying it to the real thing!
All these activities contribute to keeping your website well-maintained, ensuring your website remains secure without disrupting business operations.
That being said… even a well serviced and maintained car can break down from time to time, which is why having regular, up to date backups are so important!
Backups: The Insurance Policy Most Websites Don’t Have
Just like a regularly serviced car can still break down unexpectedly on a highway, so too can a healthy website run into issues. Plugins can fail, updates can cause conflicts, servers can crash, websites can be hacked, or someone accidently kicks the ‘delete all’ button!
Unfortunately, you can’t prevent and protect against every single scenario, but you can significantly reduce the risk and be prepared for when it does occur. In the event that your website does go offline, the most important thing is restoration (getting your website back up and running as soon as possible).
Why is restoration so important? Well when it comes to search engines, if your website is offline for days, you will most definitely be detected by a Google crawler, however… if your website is only down for a few hours or less there is a good chance you can have it back up and running before anyone (except maybe some customers) notice. Being responsive and prompt can prevent your website from taking a hit to your search rankings!
(The google crawlers will never know…)
Without reliable backups though, recovery can be slow, expensive, or flat out impossible depending on what’s been impacted. Regular automated backups allow a website to be restored quickly to a working state, minimising downtime and protecting business operations.
Most professional maintenance services include backups by default, knowing it’s crucial.
- Daily or weekly off-site backups (Not on the same server as your website)
- Multiple restore points
- Rapid recovery if the website fails
From Google’s perspective, a site that can recover quickly from issues is far more reliable than one that remains broken for days, or even hours.
Maintenance Is Part of SEO, and SEO is part of Maintenance
For search engines, a trustworthy website is one that consistently provides a safe, reliable experience for users. That trust comes not just from content, but from the technical stability of the platform itself.
Secure infrastructure, reliable uptime, proactive maintenance, and rapid restoration all contribute to a website that search engines can confidently recommend.
Just as SEO does not end once a website launches, neither should maintenance and management.
Ongoing technical maintenance plays a major role in protecting rankings, preventing security issues, and ensuring visitors always have a safe experience.
For business owners, investing in proper website maintenance is not just about avoiding problems, it is about maintaining the long-term trust of both users and search engines to maximise your SEO investment.
If you want to find out more about professional website management, explore website management plans that keep your site secure, stable, and consistently trusted by both users and search engines.
