How to Know If You Have a Google Penalty
Have you lost your website traffic recently? It may be time you thought about checking your website for Google penalties.
It’s one of the most disastrous things that can happen to you as a website owner. Therefore, you should always look for Google penalties and plan effective strategies for penalty removal.
Here are a few ways you can detect penalties:
Google Search Console
You can easily detect Google penalties with the help of a GSC. You may have to log in to your account, tap on ‘Search Traffic,’ select ‘Manual Actions’ from menu present on the side, and you’re done.
Your site is protected from punishments if you find a message for no issues are detected. In contrast, Google will show the retribution affecting your website. Moreover, you will also see a list of precise instructions that may guide you for penalty removal. There are also companies who can provide penalty removal services.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics allows you to check you website for any penalty. First, you should remember the date when you observed a drop in website traffic. Then, see if any update, such as Panda or Penguin, was launched near the date. If the dates match or are near, your site has a Google penalty.
Lookup Your Site on Google
A smart way for detecting a punishment is to find your domain name on Google by searching. Next, look for your website ranking on top page in results.
For instance, your domain is “instance.com,” if your site is not seen on the first page for “instance,” then you might have a penalty.
Moreover, you may also enter your website text for the title tag and check if it is ranking. In addition, you can match the title tag text by using double quotes incase your tag comprises commonly occurring words. If your domain is not present in the search results, you may have a Google penalty.
If you can not find your domain in the results, you are likely hit with a punishment by the search engine.
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Check Robots.txt
You might freak out after reading about every other Google update, mainly if you do not track your SEO metrics closely. In addition, a common reason for your site not appearing in results may be that your online site does not allow search engine robots to crawl on your pages.
To find out if this is the issue, you may type robots.txt at your domain end. For instance, type your domain like this “www.name.com/ robots.txt.” If you find a message stating “disallow,” your site prevents bots from crawling on your pages.
Ensure if Your Site is Indexed
You can search for site:http://www.domainname.com on Google and analyze the results. If you do not find any result, you may have a penalty.
Monitor SEO Practices
An important step to keep your site from punishments is evaluating your SEO agency or team practices. You should always check your performance and see if you’re doing any of these practices:
- Does your team use software for linking your website?
- Do you buy outbound links?
- Have you ever exchanged links?
- Are you constantly using the same anchor text for SEO?
If you follow any of these methods to add links, you may get a penalty.
