Are You Being Penalized? Google may have put your site in the penalty box without you knowing it.	Visited: 1092 5.0/5.0 (13 votes total) Rate: Select 1 - Terrible 2 - Poor 3 - Average 4 - Good 5 - Outstanding
by Brian Easter November 15, 2010

Google spiders are like a mother in law, repeatedly scrutinizing everything on the web.  While Google’s inspection of your site can have positive benefits, such as better rankings and more pages indexed, it can also lead to potential problems. 

Site penalties are the bane of any efforts you may be making to gain traffic, but often organizations are unaware that they have a problem.  Google’s policies are Google law, and just as you may be able to break the law occasionally (the speed limit is really just a suggestion, right?) you will eventually get caught and made to pay the price. 

However, not all penalties are the result of an intentional tactic, but are often the result of unintentional actions you take that have just as dire of consequences as any willful attempt to manipulate Google’s almighty algorithm.  How do you know if you have a site penalty?

What Causes Penalties

Penalty triggers fall into two broad categories: intentional and unintentional.  Again, intentional should be interpreted circumspectly. A bad SEO company, in an effort to retain your services, may be using techniques that will result in penalties.  Blackhat SEO techniques such as masking domains, doorway pages (forwarding traffic from one site to a different domain), and hidden text are measures your SEO company may be taking without your knowledge. 

You may be aware of other strategies, such as buying links, but unaware that you may be falling into a grey area.  More tangible techniques along the lines of keyword stuffing and duplicate content, may be intentional or not but may certainly result in penalties. 

Finally, unintentional practices such as too little or misleading text (in the eyes of Google), may seem subjective but can still tarnish your site’s reputation to search engines. Penalties vary in duration and severity, but even the slightest offense will result in a decrease in traffic, and therefore revenue.  Often times it’s best to consult a reputable and respected SEO agency, even if it’s just for a one time website audit.

Types of Penalties

Not all penalties have the same effect, so it is important to know what your punishment is before you attempt to resolve the issue. A decrease in PageRank may be indicative of a penalty, but is not always conclusive proof of Google’s wrath.  Instead, Google usually hits where it hurts, which in this case would be rankings. 

Generally, penalties can range from a decrease in SERP position (Google -30, -50 penalty) to an effective complete delisting of your site (Google -950), to a total ban on your site (SEO death penalty).  Penalties can last 6 months, a year, or indefinitely. 

Google may also devalue your links if it finds them spammy, which can result in a drop in ranking but without a specific numeric penalty.  There are a many variations on these themes, depending on the severity of the infraction, but none are pleasant or beneficial for your site.  However, losing rankings, PageRank, or traffic is not sufficient cause to assume a penalty; you may just have bad SEO. 

How Do You Know If You Have a Penalty?

So your rankings have dropped off the map, your site has decreased in value, and your traffic is nonexistent.  Assuming no major changes to your site have incurred, you may have a Google penalty.  Now it’s time to know for sure.

A good first step is to check search engine blogs and forums to determine if there have been any algorithm updates or changes that may have caused your page to generate a penalty.  Although Google will usually admit to algorithm changes at some point, the announcement may not coincide with the actual change, so using unofficial sources is perfectly acceptable.  If there is no news, proceed to step two.

Query site:yourdomainname.com to check the number of pages indexed, if there are none, or significantly fewer than yesterday, this is highly indicative of a penalty.  While you’re at it, search link:yourdomainname.com. Again, if you detect a significant change, you probably have a penalty.  

Another resource is Google’s Safe Browsing Diagnostic Report.  While the report will not specifically tell you if you have been penalized or not, it will alert you that your site may have been listed as suspicious, which is not a good sign.  Also, Google will directly alert websites if they are in violation of its policies through Google Webmaster Tools.

Finally, if you are still looking for clues you have suffered a penalty, copy and paste an entire paragraph of text from your website into the search engine to see if your site comes up.  With no ambiguity about what you may be searching for, your site should appear.  If it does not, you’ve been banned. 

Get the Penalty Removed

Once you realize you have a penalty, it’s time to pay your fine, do your time, and stop offending Google.  If you know what caused the penalty, and it was intentional, stop doing it.  If you don’t know why the penalty occurred, review Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.  Also, doing some research on forums is never a bad idea either, just in case Google hasn’t explicitly addressed your penalty. 

After your penalty has been fixed, if your site hasn’t been banned, the best strategy is to wait for Google to give you a pat on the head and remove the penalty.  If you have been banned, you must submit a Google re-inclusion request to have your site re-indexed by Google.  Penalty removal can take anywhere from several weeks to several months, so be patient and make sure your site is up to standards. 

Whether inadvertent or deserved, Google penalties are not to be trifled with.  Just as that forgotten speeding ticket can eventually result in jail time, not following Google’s policies, not matter how arbitrary they may seem, can end in disastrous consequences.