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One fine day, you realize that your website is having some issues. You start to wonder if your website is punished by Google or not. Maybe you have heard about Google Penalty but did not read about its details, therefore you start to feel confused.
- Why is it penalized?
- How can this issue be corrected and future problems avoided?
Don’t waste time fretting because it’s time to check the site immediately! But how can one know whether a website has been penalized by Google?
Best SEO Tool will show you how to check your website and recommend the best solutions if it has been hit by Google Penalty. Read this post to find the best answer for you!
What is Google Penalty?
In order to avoid a Google penalty, you first need to know what it is. If your website is penalized by Google, it could:
- Exit from a Google search engine.
- Drop in SERPs without warning
In most cases, the second scenario arises as a result of Google detecting that you are spamming or otherwise tampering with the search engine.
For example, a reduction in search engine ranks could be caused by over-optimizing terms on the entire website or just a few pages.
There are a lot of reasons why a website get a Google Penalty.
Why does Google penalize you?
In other words, why does Google punish famous websites? There are a slew of factors at play. Google may “notice” you for any of the following reasons.
Black Hat Technique
These are types of content obfuscation and forced user navigation to a desired page. You are concealing the fact that you are not presenting all of the content that matches the user’s search intent.
Thus, this instance is different from the case with thin content. Because when it comes to thin content, you are not presenting the user with sufficient information which means you are not attempting to conceal the user.
It is readily recognizable using Google tools. In addition, this is why the Google Panda algorithm was created.
Google bots will scour the web and determine which pages have thin content. The results you know! Your site will be subject to a Google Panda penalty.
Multiple URLs to your main sites can also be heavily penalized because of the Google Penguin algorithm update. Based on this algorithm, Google will easily detect unnatural link patterns.
Spam
After the Penguin and Payday Loan algorithms were changed, Spam was one of the most common grounds for penalties. Exact Match Domain, Google’s other prominent website checker, seeks to limit the number of spammy domains that sound similar to the main keyword.
Duplicate content
As I previously stated, this is one of the primary reasons why Google penalizes your website.
Most websites employ “fraudulent” content accidentally because they trust the person who produced it. Others use software to make their own material.
To avoid these issues, you should use plagiarism detection software on every articles. Because Google only permits you to have up to 10% of the same material as the rest of the website.
However, you may also be punished in other circumstances.
Website loading speed
This is not a significant issue that will result in Google Penalty striking your website. In the long run, however, it can degrade your page ranks and expose your website to an algorithmic penalty.
Note: Use Google’s PageSpeed Insights to quickly test page loading speed.
Other factors
- The structure of the website is incorrect.
- Hackers target a website…
- ….
The following are the most prevalent causes of Google penalty. As a result, it is critical to understand what website owners should do to avoid such problems.
How long will your website be penalized?
Manual penalties are in effect until you submit and pass reconsideration requests or until they expire. Some penalties can be kept for 6 months.
Or there are cases where websites are penalized for 2 years before they expire. Let me make this clear.
When a manual penalty expires, this does not mean that the website is safe and has recovered its rankings and traffic.
It’s simply that the penalty no longer shows up on Google Search Console. But if you do not take any action to improve this problem. Don’t expect rankings or traffic to improve.
When the ranking algorithm changes, you should calculate it accurately and quickly and wait for the next algorithm update.
There are some cases where the website recovers faster than Google’s algorithm update.
But most of the time, you’ll have to wait for the next Panda and Penguin algorithm updates to see if your changes yield more positive results.
5 ways to know if your website is in trouble
1. Unnatural links pointing to the website
You will almost likely be penalized by Google and receive a notification in Search Console if you buy links, exchange links, guest post links, put links in comments, submit your website to thousands of different spam directories, and so on.
So what can be done to recover?
Request that Google Search Console remove links (or nofollow them), and document your efforts. Use the disavow link tool to suggest that Google ignore such links and submit a reconsideration request.
If you fail the first time, go through the process again and resubmit the review request.
2. Unnatural links pointing from your website to another website
If you’ve ever sold links or have a lot of links referring to other websites on your pages. Then remove those links (or make them nofollow) and request reconsideration.
3. Thin content
If you have multiple pages on your website with thin content (little or no content), you should eliminate or merge the pages together.
These thin content pages will not work if indexing is disabled. As a result, aim to provide distinct (unique) content.
4. Duplicate Content
Google does not appreciate duplicate material. So, if you are continually copying content from other websites, cease doing so and use the same techniques outlined above for “thin content.”
5. Optimize Your Website
A website that is not Search Engine Optimization friendly is not grounds for Google to punish it. However, if you’re dealing with a Google penalty, having an SEO-friendly website will help you maintain your site as optimized as possible.
9 simple and effective ways to check your website
It’s not just Google penalty that affect site rankings. Therefore, the most important thing is that you should learn how to check if your website is penalized by Google.
There are 9 ways to check the standard website based on the following factors:
1. Traffic
Your website’s traffic suddenly decreases. What you should do is double-check to see if any updates are available at that time.
This is also a simple indicator that Google may notice your website.
2. Check Domains on Google
Enter your domain name into Google and see if it appears in one of the top ten results. If so, that’s fine.
Otherwise, Google may penalize 90 percent of your website. In addition, if you enter the domain name and core keyword into a search engine. If some pages do not appear, you may have received a partial Google penalty.
3. Check hosting
Check expired hosting
You should check to see if your hosting is still active before it’s too late. It is really simple to do; simply log in to your hosting account, select Services => My services, and a frame with an expiration date or extension will display. Furthermore, carriers frequently send renewal reminder emails 15-30 days before expiration. As a result, you should check your mailbox on a frequent basis.
Check hosting capacity
Hosting at full capacity might result in issues such as sluggish website performance and even outages. Typically, each hosting subscription includes a set quantity of hard drive space. You may view this data by logging into the hosting administrator and going to the Resource Usage section on the right hand side.
4. Check content duplication error
Check if Google is ignoring your material due to duplicate content. Because they trust the authors, most websites mistakenly replicate content. Others produce their own content with the assistance of software.
The simplest method is to append & filter=o to the end of the post URLs. And see whether your posts continue to emerge…
Congratulations! Your website has been blacklisted!
5. Check robots.txt file
Could you please check your robots.txt file for problems and/or prevent Google from crawling your URLs?
Simply eliminate anything that is preventing Google from indexing your page. Then check the Meta robots tag to see whether you have a NOINDEX or NOFOLLOW reference set.
What exactly is a Robots.txt file? Why do you need a robots.txt file for WordPress?
6. Check the blacklist again
Google may also inadvertently place your website on a blacklist (unsafe website). As a result, you should reconsider this matter.
Actually, checking the standard webpage is quite straightforward. To check, simply use the syntax below.
https://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=domainname
Google will immediately return the results to you.
7. Check Google PageRank
A dramatic reduction in Pagerank is also a red flag that your website is being penalized by Google.
Simply utilize the SEO Quake plugin to determine your website’s Google Pagerank. You’ve got it if your site’s pagerank is low!
8. Check the website’s links
When you design a website, if one page gets punished, it is possible for other pages to get Google Penalty as well.
Check to see whether your website has any external links referring to it or links from it that have been penalized by Google. If you’re not careful, this could lead to your website getting penalized.
The advice is to use the Ahrefs tool to see if your website has the same problem!
9. Over-optimized
You check to see whether you’re attempting to trick Google by packing keywords, using the same anchor text, and so on. When you do this on purpose, it’s as though you’re requesting that Google penalize me.
What you need to do is create some long anchor text that includes the core keyword (the content you want to link to).
Website testing tool
1. Website inspection tool – Search Google
You go to google.com and type in the structure [site:yoursite.com]. Then check how many results your site’s url is indexed. If you can’t find any of your URLs, it means you’ve been given a Google Penalty yellow card. Careful!
2. Check the website with Google Analytics
Log in to the Google Analytics testing tool and review your website’s organic traffic to check your website traffic.
This is the best way to see if your website has been hit by an automatic penalty. If you see a drop in traffic during the days of Google’s algorithm update, chances are you’ve been affected.
And that could be the reason your traffic drops.
- Select your website from the Google Analytics Dashboard interface.
- Go to Acquisition > All Traffic > Source/Medium.
- Google/ Organic (as shown below)
From this report, you will know the number of visitors from Google. Next, select the reporting period at the top of the page, on the right. Then adjust the timeframe you want.
You can adjust the time frame from 7/2018 – 8/2018 (the time when Google has a big Google Panda algorithm update).
What you need to do now is compare the days when you saw a big drop (or increase) in traffic with the days of the algorithm update.
See also other Google algorithms to avoid penalties effectively: Google Hummingbird, Google Medic, Google Sandbox.
If you see a sudden drop in traffic on or near the date of the Google update, check to see what Google has updated and what needs to be done to restore your website.
Hint: You can create annotations in your Google Analytics reports to mark days with significant traffic changes.
3. W3C Validator
W3C Validator is a free tool provided by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) that checks HTML and CSS errors during coding.
Checking these codes is extremely important, not only to help improve the quality of the website, but also to save a lot of time and money.
However, this tool does not guarantee 100% complete error-free testing or 100% adherence to standard parameters. Therefore you can view the tool as reference support information.
4. Webpagetest
The above tool allows to test page loading speed from many locations around the world.
You can test basic website speed or use advanced features like video capture, content blocking…
The tool will provide the most comprehensive report on the factors affecting the website’s page load speed as well as suggestions for improvement.
5. How to check website with Webmaster Tools
If you haven’t used the Google Webmaster Tool (Google Search Console) testing tool for your website yet, it’s time.
Sign in now https://www.google.com/webmasters/ and see if Google Search Console reports any issues?
Some common errors:
- Error 404
- Website has a virus
- The website contains a link containing a virus
- Duplicate content
Webmaster tools will help inform webmasters of potential problems your website may have and this could lead to a Google penalty.
Before showing how to check errors through webmaster tools, I will clarify this issue. Do you know how many main types of penalties Google has? And how are they different?
These are the 2 types of penalties Google follows: Manual Penalties and Google Algorithmic Penalties.
Manual penalty
An individual (or possibly from a webspam group) has applied a penalty to your site. This can be due to a number of reasons and it can affect the entire website or a part (affect only some pages of your website).
When this happens, Google will point out some problems with some specific actions so you can adjust your website.
Once you have made some necessary adjustments, you can submit a review request. And from there, Google will notify you whether your website has been removed from the penalty or not.
Algorithmic penalty
This is the most common type of penalty and it is automatic. I mean these algorithmic penalties are not communicated to webmaster tools and there is no option to fill in a reconsideration request.
Algorithmic penalties are caused by Google constantly updating the algorithm.
Going back to the example above, you can log into the webmaster tools to check if your website has been manually penalized.
Go to Search Traffic > Manual Actions to check your website.
If you see the message, “No manual webspam actions found“, then….
You don’t have to take any further action. Your website is safe!
However, you will have to continue with the steps below to find out if you are affected by an algorithmic penalty.
In the event of a manual penalty, you need to read the notes carefully, try to fix the problem, and then request a site review.
Solutions to avoid being penalized by Google and restore your site
The best way to recover from a Google penalty is to avoid it in the first place.
In my experience, webmasters are always looking for shortcuts to higher rankings for their websites. And of course Google doesn’t like this.
Here are some specific tips: How to avoid Google penalty and play by the rules?
- Check all the links and content of your website regularly
- Keep an eye on Google updates that affect SEO (e.g. https, be mobile-friendly, avoid using anchor texts with exact keywords when linking out, to nofollow external links.
- Make a reasonable choice of advertising and links
- Keep the site secure
- Choose a suitable website hosting
- Promote website and content through white hat
- If you are penalized, fix all issues and submit a reconsideration request
- Post high quality content
- Comply with all google webmaster guidelines
Conclusion
If unfortunately, you get penalized by Google, don’t worry too much, rush to find ways to get your website back. As long as you do the above consistently for a few months, your website will definitely be removed from Google’s penalty.
Not to mention, if your content is good, it will attract more organic traffic and improve rankings on Google rankings. (Can rank higher before you get penalized by Google)
To achieve good results with Google, you need to be patient and play by the rules!
If you have any questions about the article “What is Google Penalty? How to check if your website is penalized by Google?“, please comment below this article!
