How to know if your site has been penalized by Google

[ogdcorp]

Hello,

One of my clients ranking drop dramatically.
We believe it was due to an upgrade to his site.

While the site was live www.clientdomain.com
Work was being done on the new site www.clientdomain.com/new (1 month)

I think google crawled the /new link and took as a content duplication since both sites had the same content.

Is there a MOZ tool to see if a site has been penalized or any online tool?

Thanks

[RobertFisher]

SEO student is correct re where manual or partial manual penalties will appear. As to your real problem, I do not think it is a manual penalty. I think you have messed things up with trying to build a new site on the old while it is still up. Is there a reason you did not build the new site on a dev domain : OliversDevDomain.com/clientsite? Get the site where you want it and then simply repoint the domain.

Probably, you have 'confused' things with the search engines by having duped content, and/or you have redirects that are 404ing, etc. Have you run the site on screaming frog or similar software to see what you have? That would be my first move, then I would make a change in how I was rebuilding. It is likely, if the rebuild is complete and you no longer have duplicate content (and the url structure is unchanged) you will likely pop back into the rankings fairly soon.

I would be disingenuous if I did not say that given the approach to the redesign, it is likely there are other issues. If you have a baseline crawl of the old site to compare to the new that would be helpful.

Good luck with this,

Robert

[Gavo]

Hi Oliver,

If Google has penalised the site for duplicate content it will appear in Google Webmaster Tools under a section called Manual Actions on the left hand side.

Configure Google Webmaster Tools to the site and once installed that is the place to log into and take a look!

Good luck!