subject: How To Find Whether Google Has Penalized Your Website? [print this page] How To Find Whether Google Has Penalized Your Website?
If your site has suddenly vanished from Google's ranking pages and you don't know what happened exactly, penalization may probably be one of the reasons. Google algorithms are a mystery, and the more you try to understand them, the more complex they seem! So let's not assume ways of how you can detect and resolve your site from being penalized but instead follow experts' advice, coming straight from Google itself..!
Combining the bits and pieces quoted by Google's own advisors in matters of SEO for a professional SEO Company and how Google algorithms operate, we put forward a 3 steps test to check whether your site has been penalized by Google or not:
What Your Links Say?
John Mueller (Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google): "If aboutus.org outranks you for your domain name, you've got problems and it probably has something to do with links, how you manipulated them, got them, or distributed them."
This clearly tells that having "the wrong locality" and getting rotten links from link farms or sites having 0 PR can greatly affect your ranking and get you penalized in Google. There are a number of tools like Bad Neighborhood available to check where you're getting your back links from.
What Your Content Says?
John Mueller: "If entire chunks of extremely long tail searches go missing then it's probably because the content is available at 50 other websites, generally this is for your weak travel affiliate type stuff where they just republish hotel descriptions provided by their affiliate provider. I don't consider that a penalty but rather a crap website that deserves to not being seen because it's not bringing anything new to the party, and better ways to sort that information, better graphics, and a cooler template don't constitute anything new."
Content duplication may not only get you penalized but even get your site exempted from search engines for good. So, make sure to be unique and original with what you're writing and putting up on your site. Similar to link spamming you can also track your content for duplication using software like Copyscape and Virante. You can also compare two pages to check their content similarity with each other with tools like Webconf and Duplicate Content.
What Matt Cutts Says?
A webmaster facing the problem of penalization took up the task to clean up the punished site and removed all the paid links, filed a reconsideration request but it showed no results. With no visible solution, Matt was consulted for help.
Matt looked at the site and identified two problems; one with the footer which stated on being open to compensations, and for matt, compensations affected a site or blog quite badly. Second was with one of the sponsored articles but without having a "nofollow" tag, which seemed to be an open violation of Google webmaster guidelines. Correction of both these problems was expected to resolve the issue within days.
Prevention is always better than the cure. Therefore, to be on a safer side and to know where your site is headed, it is always better to regularly analyze your site using Google webmaster tools.
