A Google penalty is a negative impact on your site’s ranking. Penalties may be due to Google algorithm updates or manual review. A tell-tale sign that your site has been penalized is a sudden drop in your rankings and traffic.
How to identify a Google penalty
It’s impossible to tell that your site has been penalized just by looking at it, you have to use other ways. One of the ways is to use Google webmaster tools. The tools are free and come in handy when it comes to monitoring and optimizing your site. You need to log in to your site, and if a penalty is imposed on your site, you’ll see a notification.
Another way is by using Google analytics. Like webmaster tools, it’s free and helps you keep track of the status of your site. It also helps you easily track changes in your organic traffic. You need to log in to your analytics account and identify the date when most of your web traffic was lost. You need to find out if a Google update was released on the same day. If this is the case, your site was affected by the update and you need to take steps to get out of it.
You can also identify if your site has been penalized by searching for your domain name and see if it will rank first. If you don’t, you are definitely penalized. In addition to using these methods, there are many third-party tools that you can use. Some of the tools are free while others will require you to pay. Find the right one for your application.
Taking a look at the different penalties and their effects.
google panda: It is the most common penalty and targets sites with low-quality content. If your site has been penalized by Panda, you will experience a sharp but gradual drop in web traffic. Your pages will also have trouble ranking no matter how many links you add to them.
google penguin: This is another common penalty that targets sites with unnatural links. When your site is affected by the penguin, you will find that your keyword or a group of keywords have dropped significantly in the rankings. In most cases, the page or pages containing the keywords can be deindexed.
Conclution
Here’s what you need to know about Google penalties. To protect your site from being penalized, you must strictly follow the rules given by the search engine.