How Do You Know or Find Out if You've been hit by a Google Penalty?
-
Hi Moz Community,
How do you find out if you have been hit with a Google Penalty?
Thanks,
Gary
-
Hi there,
For manual penalty, please check your search console under manual actions tab.
For algorithm penalty, you may notice huge drop in traffic and rankings, and may not rank for your brand name
-
Hi Kirsten,
Thanks for sharing. I'll have a look. Thanks for sharing the three points.
Have a great day.
G
-
Hi Deacyde,
Thanks for dropping in. I'll take a look at both sites and see what I can come up with.
It's funny the more you work at digital marketing you realize the less you know...
Fun game, just want to stay above board.
Gary
-
Not to barge in but I recently used these two sites coupled with analytics data to see if a drop correlated with a algo update.
I used http://feinternational.com/website-penalty-indicator/
Which will use estimated search traffic as far back as 2012 to present and overlays google algo updates ( color coded by type of algo ) so you can see what drop relates to what algo update.
I also used http://barracuda.digital/panguin-tool/
Which will ask to link to your analytics account ( read only ), you'll select the account, and the view and it will do the same as above, overlays the google algo updates to help you figure out what algo you were possibly hit by. ( also give further info about what each algo was and where to read more about it at )
If you don't want to use those kinda sites, your analytics data will be your best resource, looking for big drops after a steady flatline or increase could be an indication of a penalty, but really don't just assume, find out as much info about the algo update you think relates with your drops to see if your site really lacks in the area the algo was about.
Hope this helps!
-
Thanks Kristen. appreciate the feedback. What is the top three steps I would take to check the site for an algorithm penalty?
Thanks,
G
-
It will be listed under Manual Penalties in your Webmaster Console.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Google +1s Quality Factors?
It is apparent that Google +1s are becoming an increasingly large factor in results pages and I had a few questions about some of the dynamics. Do +1s take into account factors such as c-blocks, location diversity based on IP, and similar elements? To what degree? Do +1s from well-diversified and historically more active/authoritative G+ accounts carry more weight than someone who simply has a G+ account because they use Gmail and were prompted? What is the spectrum here? How much weight would a +1 from Rand Fishkin hold in contrast to an account created one year ago with little activity? I know Google has a great deal of user data from Gmail, YouTube, Calendar, Docs, search history and many more so would imagine this plays a role. Do +1s from newly created accounts that only target one business or niche cause damage? I am assuming that +1s should accumulate naturally just as backlinks so if what would be considered an unnatural amount of +1s in what time period? Any insights here are greatly appreciated!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SEOGroup1230 -
Google 'most successful online businesses'
how come this guy has all but 1 of the top ten results? (UK results - I'm guessing same in USA?) - with thin content on a spammed keyword on multi-sub domains? How can we 'white hat' guys compete if stuff like this is winning?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TheInternetWorks0 -
What to do if you've been hacked.....
Just logged into our CMS system and it appears we have been hacked. All page titles have been hijacked adding a secondary title tag linking out to website http://emapaydayloans.com with anchor text pay day loans. Our Web Dev team are working on fixing the hack now. My concern is the potential knock on effect to SEO. This looks like a bad neighbourhood site: 3 pages indexed PR 0 And for I don't know how long we've had almost every page on all our domains linking out with the following page title including the same link and anchor text: payday loans I assume its a wait and see at this stage.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RobertChapman0 -
Massive drop in Google traffic after upping pagecount 8-fold.
I run a book recommendation site -- Flashlight Worthy. It's a collection of original, topical book lists: "The Best Books for Healthy (Vegetarian) Babies" or "Keystone Mysteries: The Best Mystery Books Set in Pennsylvania" or "5 Books That Helped Me Discover and Love My Italian Heritage". It's been online for 4+ years. Historically, it's been made up of: a single home page ~50 "category" pages, and ~425 "book list" pages. (That 50 number and 425 number both started out much smaller and grew over time but has been around 425 for the last year or so as I've focused my time elsewhere.) On Friday, June 15 we made a pretty big change to the site -- we added a page for every Author who has a book that appears on a list. This took the number of pages in our sitemap from ~500 to 4,149 overnight. If an Author has more than one book on the site, the page shows every book they have on the site, such as this page: http://www.flashlightworthybooks.com/books-by/Roald-Dahl/2805 ..but the vast majority of these author pages have just one book listed, such as this page: http://www.flashlightworthybooks.com/books-by/Barbara-Kilarski/2116 Obviously we did this as an SEO play -- we figured that our content was getting ~1,000 search entries a day for such a wide variety of queries that we may as well create pages that would make natural landing pages for a broader array of queries. And it was working... 5 days after we launched the pages, they had ~100 new searches coming in from Google. (Ok, it peaked at 100 and dropped down to a steady 60 or so day within a few days, but still. And then it trailed off for the last week, dropping lower and lower every day as if they realized it was repurposed content from elsewhere on our site...) Here's the problem: For the last several years the site received ~30,000 search entries a month... a little more than 1,000 a day on weekdays, a little lighter on weekends. This ebbed and flowed a bit as Google made tweaked things (Panda for example), as we garnered fresh inbound links, as the GoodReads behemoth stole some traffic... but by and large, traffic was VERY stable. And then, on Saturday, exactly 3 weeks after we added all these pages, the bottom fell out of our search traffic. Instead of ~1,000 entries a day, we've had ~300 on Saturday and Sunday and it looks like we'll have a similar amount today. And I know this isn't just some Analytics reporting problem as Chartbeat is showing the same drop. As search is ~80% of my traffic I'm VERY eager to solve this problem... So: 1. Do you think the drop is related to my upping my pagecount 8-fold overnight? 2. Do you think I'd climb right back into Google's good graces if I removed all the pages at once? Or just all the pages that only list one author (which would be the vasy majority). 3. Have you ever heard of a situation like this? Where Google "punishes" a site for creating new pages out of existing content? Really, it's useful content -- and these pages are better "answers" for a lot of queries. When someone searches for "Norah Ephron books" it's better they land on a page of ours that pulls together the 4 books we have than taking them to a page that happens to have just one book on it among 5 or 6 others by other authors. What else? Thanks so much, help is very appreciated. Peter
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | petestein1
Flashlight Worthy Book Recommendations
Recommending books so good, they'll keep you up past your bedtime. 😉0 -
Google Penguin for non-English queries?
Does anybody know if non-English queries were also 'hit' by the Google Penguin update? All Penguin horror stories out there are from sites focusing on English queries, and in some (Dutch) industries I'm monitoring, some sites with spammy backlink profiles are still ranking.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RBenedict0 -
I think I've been hit by Penguing - Strategy Discusson
Hi, I have a network of 50 to 60 domain names which have duplicated content and whose domains are basically a geographical location + the industry I am in. All of these websites have links to my main site. Over the weekend I saw my traffic fall. I attribute our drop in rankings to what people are calling Penguing 1.1. I want to keep my other domains as we are slowly creating unique content for each of those sites. However, in the mean time, clearly I need to deal with the inbound linking and anchor text problem. Would adding a nofollow tag to all links that point to my main site resolve my issue with Google's penguin update? Thanks for the help.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MangoMan160 -
Why Proved Spammers are on 1st Google SERP's Results
This question is related exclusively to few proved spammers who have gained 1st Google search results for specific terms in the Greek market, targeting Greek audience. Why he looks spammer and very suspicious? For instance, the site epipla-sofa.gr, sofa.gr, fasthosting.gr and greekinternetmarketing.com look suspicious regarding their building link activities: 1. suspicious spiky link growth 2. several links from unrelated content (unrelated blog posts forom other markets, paid links, hidden links) 3. excessive amount of suspicious link placements (forum profiles, blog posts, footer and sidebar links) 4. Greek anchor text with the keyword within articles written in foreign languages (total spam) 5. Unnatural anchor text distribution (too many repetitions) So the main question is: Why Google is unable to recognize/trace some of these (or even all) obvious spamming tactics and still these spammy sites as shwon below reside on the 1st Google.gr SERPs. Examples of spam sites according to their link building history: www.greekinternetmarketing.com www.epipla-sofa.gr www.fasthosting.gr www.sofa.gr All their links look very similar. They use probably software to build links, or even hack authority sites and leave hidden links (really dont know how they could do that). Could you please explain or share similar issues? Have you ever found any similar cases in your industry, and how did you tackle it? We would appreciate your immediate attention to this matter. Regards, George
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Clickwisegr0 -
What's been your experience with profile link-building?
What have your experiences been? Short Term? Long Term? There isn't a lot written about it, and I'm wondering where it falls in the order of things. I was very hesitant to jump in, but have launched a few campaigns, both for local geo targeting phrases, and national accounts. Surprisingly, I've seen a surge in rankings, but also wonder how short lived they will be. I've noticed the links still don't come up in tools like open site explorer, but I'm able to find them when searching for the unique username I used while building the profiles. The sites I'm listing on have no relevance to industry, unless by chance, although the PR's I'm using are all 4 or higher. Is this considered gray hat?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | skycriesmary720