GDPR and SEO - advantages and disadvantages

 

As you probably already know, the EU's new personal data regulation, the General Data Protection Regulation (usually abbreviated to GDPR), enters into force today - 25 May. In this regard, most website owners need to make some adjustments to their website, in order to live up to the law. 

Hopefully, you have control over what needs to be done on your particular website but have you thought about how it may affect your SEO. Can GDPR Harm SEO? Can it benefit? We will take a closer look at this in this post. 

What does the GDPR require of your website?

In this post, I will not go into detail about what exactly you need to do on your website to live up to the new personal data regulation. Because it all depends on what functions you have and it is at least something you should review with your own lawyer if you have not already done so.

But you will probably have at least some of the following needs and challenges that can affect your SEO:

You may want to consider changing your website to secure hosting (SSL) if you are not already using it. It is, as far as I understand, not a legal requirement, but it may put you a little better, as you then make it significantly harder for unauthorized persons to hack into the data connection between your users and your website. You must probably have updated your handling of cookies so that you get the right acceptance from users about which cookies you may set. Forms, shopping processes, online orders, file upload functions, etc. you must probably have updated so that you get the right consent from the users that you may process the data they send it to you. 
You should no doubt have updated your privacy policy, consent form, and cookie policy and published it on your website - if you do not already do so. You may also need to provide a data processing agreement. In addition to the above, there may also be a need to change the way you handle the data your website may receive from users, but as this will have no impact on SEO I will not go into it further in this post. 

How GDPR can harm your SEO

GDPR does not necessarily have to end up hurting your SEO, but there are some of the things you should probably change on your website that in the worst-case scenario can have a negative impact. It depends a lot on how you implement your changes. 

Let's take a closer look at the things that can potentially cause problems…

Crawling

The first thing you need to make sure is that Google (and all other search engines) can continue to crawl your website. They must have access to all the pages and files that you want to be indexed without being required to support cookies. For search engine crawlers do not usually support cookies.

This has always been an important technical SEO service in Lahore requirement but in connection with the fact that you probably change the way your website handles cookies, there is a small risk that it may go wrong.

So, for the sake of security, check with your developers that a browser or search engine crawler can still access all your pages (and necessary CSS and JavaScript files) whether they accept cookies or not. 

Cookie administration

In addition to the way your website handles cookies, you will probably also need to change the way you collect and manage user acceptance of the use of cookies. 

Whether you make your very own system for it, whether your web developers or CMS provider takes care of it, or whether you choose one of the ready-made systems for it - such as. Danish Cookie bot, then there is a risk that it can make all your pages a little heavier and slower to load. And as you probably know, speed is a very important ranking factor in Google today. So if your website, as a result of your GDPR solution, becomes slower, it may affect your visibility in Google. And even if your pages do not - technically speaking, almost do not slow down, then there can still be a problem. Some solutions require new JavaScript files to be loaded in the header, which must be downloaded before the page starts rendering. This can cause the so-called "render-blocking" problems - the perceived speed becomes slower. You can possibly do this. check-in Google Page Speed ​​Insight. A final problem with handling cookies maybe if you choose an external service that includes their JavaScript calls, but that they are blocking Google from crawling these scripts. It can hurt your indexing, as Google would very much like to see all the files that together create your pages (among other things to make sure you do not spam them and to get an idea of ​​what your pages look like). 

User engagement

One of the things that has annoyed me the most with GDPR is the cumbersome requirements for the permissions we need from users when we need to handle their data. We must, for example. when they submit a form. We know from bitter experience that the more we demand of users, the fewer do as we ask them to. So just the fact that in the future for most websites will probably have to be added an "accept" checkbox can make the conversions fall a bit. The slightly lower user engagement it expresses can, in the worst case, damage your SEO. I would therefore recommend that you be very careful about how you solve this. Do as little as your lawyer deems necessary and implement it in as user-friendly a way as possible. And keep an eye out for it if it hurts your conversions. If necessary, try other ways to implement your lawyer's claims. 

Duplicate Content

Some of the new policies you need to have published on your website will probably be built on more or less standardized wording from your lawyer, or online services that help with that sort of thing.

There is therefore a high risk that these texts will be perceived by Google as Duplicate Content.

I would therefore recommend that you exclude all pages with such policies from crawling or indexing in all search engines.

This is how GDRP can benefit your SEO

And now for the slightly more cheerful part of the story. GDPR is not necessarily only of evil. 

Overall, as an ordinary consumer and digital citizen, I must say that I think it is good that with the GDPR there is a little more control over how companies process my personal data. And it's good to get some transnational rules and rights in place. That's how I think many other consumers feel too. And how can it benefit in terms of SEO? Let's take a closer look at the conditions that I think may have an impact.

SSL - Secure Hosting benefits SEO

It is not new that SSL benefits SEO. Google has long given a small boost to websites on secure hosting. In addition, the latest browser versions have added another motivational element, as websites that are not hosted on SSL are highlighted as insecure. It is not exactly something that increases the conversion rate 🙂 That so - at least for some websites, now can be an added advantage over GDPR by switching to SSL may get the latter on the wagon. If you are considering switching to SSL yourself, then I would recommend that you do so - both for security reasons and because it benefits your SEO services in Islamabad.

GDPR and SEO - what to do?

In relation to the GDPR, there is not much to do. We all have to comply with that law if we want to run a legal business. However, I would like to warn a little against the widespread over-interpretation of the rules that I have found. Apparently, there are quite a few lawyers and system vendors who smell gold and try to scare us all into buying more than necessary. We have been lucky to have access to one of the lawyers who know the most about GDPR and he has a nice pragmatic relationship to things. So we are in the process of implementing what is strictly necessary for the most user-friendly way. And that's my best advice - do not do more than you should, and be careful that you implement your solutions in such a user- and search-engine-friendly way. In any case, I hope this post helps you a little on the right path. If you have any questions, please write below.