DDoS and SEO Impact

A DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack overwhelms a web server with a massive volume of requests, making it unavailable. For SEO, the impact is direct and potentially severe: if Googlebot encounters 5xx errors or timeouts during an attack, it reduces crawl frequency. Prolonged or repeated attacks can cause partial deindexation. The impact on Core Web Vitals is also measurable (degraded TTFB, inaccessible pages). Protections include using a CDN with DDoS protection (Cloudflare, AWS Shield), rate limiting, configuring WAF (Web Application Firewall) rules, and having an incident response plan. During an attack, returning a 503 code with Retry-After is preferable to 5xx errors, signaling to Googlebot that the unavailability is temporary.