How To Know If Google Is Penalizing Your Site
By Anna Johnson on August 11th, 2009Has your website been dropped from Google’s search engine? Has it been months since you built the site and it still hasn’t been indexed? Or has its ranking declined without any obvious reason? If you suspect Google may be penalizing you in some way, Search Marketing Standard’s Rebecca Appleton has some helpful tips for finding out for sure…
In fact, Rebecca recommends using Google’s own tools to test if you have been penalized in some way. For more details check out her excellent article (link below). For now, here’s a summary of Rebecca’s suggestions for conducting a ‘self-diagnosis’:
1. Use Google Analytics to check your referrers. If the referred traffic from Google has substantially declined, that’s a sign of a drop in your rankings across all keywords – a sign Google has revised its opinion of you.
You can also assess traffic from all your keywords. If there’s a decline in traffic from just some of your keywords, the problem may not be a Google penalty, but rather a revised view of your site’s authority for those keywords.
2. Use Google Webmaster Tools to check for, among other things, any crawl errors. A crawl error report may reveal that some of your webpages are timing out or are invisible to Google because of a robots.txt file or webpage instruction that prevents robots from spidering those pages. Again, not necessarily a penalty but something you’ll want to fix.
3. Use Google’s ‘Very Useful Safe Browsing Diagnostic Report’ to tell you if Google has somehow marked your website as ‘suspicious’.
If so, Google will almost certainly penalize your website, but, more importantly, you’ll probably want to know why your site has been rated as suspicious!
This typically comes about where your site is being used to distribute or install malicious software on a web visitor’s computer without their consent. Definitely not something you want to do, and if you’re not the one behind it, chances are your webserver has been hacked and cybercriminals are using your site to distribute malware!
4. Use Google to search for your domain name. If your site doesn’t rank first for its own domain name, it has probably been penalized. If your site is brand new, of course, it may just be that Google hasn’t indexed it yet.
What if your analysis suggests that Google has, indeed, penalized your site?
The first thing to do is to find out why. If the answer isn’t obvious, be sure to review all Google’s guidelines concerning indexing and de-indexing. Then it’s a matter of making changes to comply with Google’s terms.
Rebecca Appleton suggests making changes gradually and testing the impact of these changes. However, if the penalties have caused your business to come to a standstill, you may wish to lodge a reconsideration request with Google.
Source: Rebecca Appleton, “Using Google Tools To Identify Google Penalties.” Search Marketing Standard
August 13th, 2009 at 7:02 am
hi
just to add to the google penalization…
if your site violates google’s webmaster rules, you get the notification in red in google webmaster tools.
i found out the hard way….
i was using onlywire to build some extra backlinks – but i have a feew subdomains on my site, and wanted to promote them all at the same time.
the flood of backlinks alerted google, and twelve hours later i had this nice message waiting at webmaster tools….
my own stupidity.
the reconsideration request takes a few weeks – and you may, or may not be contacted physically, regardless of the outcome.
i’m still waiting…
regards
pj
August 13th, 2009 at 8:40 am
You could also do this
Do “site:yourdomain.com” in Google, that will tell you for real, if your site is getting indexed or not. In most cases, you can simply request a reconsideration if you suspect you are being penalized for what is not your fault.
August 13th, 2009 at 6:25 pm
Thanks Mohan – that’s a great tip. A simple technique that gives you a pretty clear answer.