According to Indigo’s recent FY24 First Quarter Results, a ransomware attack that occurred in Q4 2023, “impacted Indigo’s search engine optimization, which led to a weaker online presence and a decrease in online traffic…”
What’s interesting is that the ramsomware attack, according to CBC: “In February [2023]” Indigo was hit by a massive cyberattack that rendered its stores unable to process debit or credit card transactions for several days, and wiped out online sales for almost a month.”
I took a look at the SEMrush ranking data for Indigo.ca, and it looks like there was a pretty big impact in March 2023, where the website was only ranking for about 80,000 keywords. However, SEMrush data also shows that the site started losing rankings in January 2023, before the ransomware attack in February 2023. Then in April 2023 the site recovered quickly, going from ranking for 80k keywords in March 2023 to ranking for 303k keywords in April 2023.
It sounds like the ransomware attack somehow forced the website to go down or the website to not have inventory (thus not many pages on the site). There were definitely inventory issues, and it took some time for the company’s inventory to get back to regular levels. The website was severely impacted, and as a result of that the website’s search engine rankings were affected. Luckily, though, it appears to have been short-lived, as the rankings came back for the company.
