How to check if your website is being penalized by Google
How to check if your website is being penalized by Google
If you're wondering how to check if your site is being penalized by Google
- This detailed guide is exclusively for you.Do you notice a sudden drop in traffic on your website?
- It could be due to a Google fine (also known as Google algorithm updates).
A Google penalty leads to a sudden drop in the rankings of the entire site or just a few pages on the website. If you see a traffic drop or lost rankings for your most visited pages, act fast so you can recover your traffic and search rankings.
Let's discuss in detail how to determine if your site has been banned or penalized by Google, along with Google's criminal control tools and ways to solve a Google fine.
Are you ready? Let's jump into the details.
1. How to identify if your website has been banned or completely indexed by Google?
First, let's see how to determine if your site is banned or not indexed by Google search engine crawlers.
If your website has been banned from Google, it has completely disappeared from Google's servers and will not be seen for any kind of search on Google.
To determine if your site has been banned or de-indexed from Google Search, here are some Google search strings you should enter on Google to know if your website is banned by Google or not.
Type site: yourdomain.com (replace yourdomain with your domain name) on Google, and if you happen to see any data against your website, it means that Google has no data for your website stored in its database.
If you can see some results, you will not be banned by Google.
If you see a drop in traffic on your website, your website may have been penalized by updates to Google's search algorithm, or you did something against Google's guidelines.
Type link: uwdomain.com (replace yourdomain with your domain name) on Google Search and try to find the number of backlinks Google shows for your website.
If Google previously showed some backlinks for your website and now does not display backlinks, this is a serious problem.
If you don't see results against either of the above commands, your website will definitely be banned or completely indexed by Google.
Want to watch our video tutorial on how to restore Google updates? Checking out!
Top 3 Google Criminal Check Tools
If you are looking for Google Criminal Check tools to check whether or not your site is being penalized by Google, here are a few that can help you.
1. SEMrush Sensor - Google Algorithm Tracking Tool
One of the most widely used SEO tools is SEMrush (used by over 3 million people worldwide). It offers you a tool called SEMrush Sensor that measures the volatility in search results.
It tracks over 20 categories ranging from beauty to finance to mobile and desktop travel and highlights potential Google Updates.
This is what the SEMrush sensor looks like;
As you can see above, you can easily check the SERP volatility of the past 30 days (low resources, no issues and very high resources, a major Google algorithm update is taking place).
This is an incredible free SEO tool that makes it easy to analyze whether your website has been affected by Google's algorithm updates. You must create a free account with your Gmail account to access this great free tool.
Once you sign into your free account, you can enter your website URL to know if your site is affected by Google updates.
Here's what it looks like;
As you can see above, you can easily research your site and find out if you have been disadvantaged by updates like Panda, Penguin or other updates from Google.
3. Fruition's Google Penalty Checker
This is the latest free penalty checker tool that allows you to graphically see which of the Google updates have affected your website rankings or traffic.
The free version of this tool gives you access to only two websites, as well as access to the last 3 months of updates. With their pro version, you can get the latest data with more limits.
Here's what it looks like;
As you can see above, this tool gives you an analysis of your traffic along with the impact and the Google update that caused traffic drop.
There you go. That's how you can use Google penalty check tools or manual Google search strings to easily check if your website is being penalized by Google.
Using SEMrush's Backlink Audit Tool to remove toxic links
SEMrush is my choice when it comes to finding and removing bad backlinks.
Why? It offers a great tool called "Backlink Audit" that helps you identify and reject toxic backlinks from your site before Google penalizes you with another freaky update.
Grab Your 30 Days FREE SEMrush Pro Account ($ 99.95 Value)
2. These are the benefits of using SEMrush's Backlink Audit tool.
Find all your backlinks using Search Console integration
You can find, check and delete all toxic backlinks.
You can use the Google Disavow tool to remove all toxic backlinks.
You can track your lost and found backlinks.
All in all, the Backlink Audit tool helps you keep your backlink profile clean and you can also regularly crawl to keep an eye on your backlinks.
Quick note: SEMrush's Backlink Audit tool performs a regular crawl of your website every two weeks, allowing you to keep your backlink profile clean.
So what are you waiting for?
Try SEMrush's Backlink Audit Tool for FREE today! (and remove all toxic links)
Want to know how to use their Backlink Audit tool to find and remove toxic links?
Here is a simple step-by-step tutorial on how to use the SEMrush Backlink Audit tool.
Step 1: Once you are on the SEMrush dashboard, go to the "Backlink Audit" tool which you can find under the "Link Building" tab. Then click on the "New backlink audit" at the top right to create a new project.
Here's what it looks like;
Enter your domain and name the project and click the Create Project button to continue. For more information on setting up your backlink project correctly, please refer to this guide from SEMrush.
Make sure to connect your website to the Google Search Console for better results.
Step 2: After creating your project, perform the Backlink audit so that it checks all backlinks on your website.
Once the crawling is complete, the result of the Backlink Audit will look like this;
As you can see above, we have already rejected more than 900 links from our backlink audit.
You will also notice several things in the Backlink Audit report, including;
Overall Toxic Score
Total Number of Backlinks Analyzed
All Domains Analyzed by Toxic Score
Step 3: Decline All Toxic Links
Once you have a list of all the toxic links you want to remove from your site, you can begin to decline them. Just select the toxic links and click the Remove> button to decline to send those toxic links to Google's reject tool.
Quick note: You can also manually contact the website owners to remove those links at the end (optional though).
Then you can visit the "Decline" section on SEMrush to export your most toxic backlinks.
For more information, watch my YouTube video on how to use SEMrush's Backlink Audit tool to remove backlinks.
Grab Your 30 Days FREE SEMrush Pro Account ($ 99.95 Value)
3. Ten Reasons Google Your Website and Beyond
Can Punish Let's talk about some of the possible reasons that could lead to website punishment by Google. Next, we will discuss how to recover from Google sanctions in this detailed guide.
1. Toxic or Broken Links
If your website pages have too many broken links or toxic backlinks, send bad signals to Google.
Google hates 404 error pages. Nobody likes 404 error pages, including your website visitors.
Search engines like Google prioritize # 1 backlink profiles.
Backlinks are the reason why authority sites score well. So you have to fix broken links on your website. You can use tools like Xenu link sleuth or W3C Link Checker to find broken links.
If you use WordPress, you can use the plug-in broken links to check who checks your blog for broken links and lets you know if any broken links were found.
2. Slow loading pages
Nobody likes to stay on a website that takes too long to load, not even Google crawlers. Google always wants to provide its users with the fastest experience, so it rewards the fast-loading sites.
If you see a traffic drop on your site, it could be because of the slow loading of pages on your site. Make sure to use tools like Pingdom tools, Google PageSpeed Insights, GTMetrix etc. to find out the performance and loading times of your page.
If your site takes more than 2 to 3 seconds to load, you should give priority 1 to increasing the speed of your website, because it matters a lot. Speed is also a Google ranking factor.
Focus on improving your page load times by;
installing lightweight plugins (and limiting the use of your plugins)
Enable
Switching to a faster page-caching web host like WPX hosting
Compressing your image formats
Read: How to Index Your New Site Quickly on Google
3. Anchor Text About Optimization
Are you about optimizing your anchor text links? Do you enter keywords while linking to your internal posts (or external links)? If yes, then you have problems.
Excess anchor text is similar to keyword filling (because you can have too much anchor text on a given page) and it can lead to a Google fine. So avoid too many keywords on a page that links to other pages of a website or all to the same page but with different anchor texts.
4. Duplicate Content Problems
If you just copy or simply re-save the content already available on the web, you will NEVER see great results from Google and your site may soon be penalized or even banned by Google.
Google only wants to show well-researched and high-quality original content to its users and not duplicate content (or repeated content). Ideally, you should only create original and niche-specific content.
Google updates like Panda update focus more on rewarding the sites with high quality content and lowering the ranking of those websites that produce thin or duplicate content.
5. Too many ads or pop-ups
Yes, it is essential for any blogger or marketer to use ads on their sites. After all, we all have to make money with our blogs to survive. But don't overdo it by placing too many ads (be it banner ads, AdSense ads, Infolinks ads, affiliate product ads and so on).
You should limit your ad usage and make sure that you use your ads smartly and that they don't interrupt the user experience of your website.
Also, stop using excessive pop-ups, as Google has a rolled-out intrusive mobile interstitial sanction where it started punishing the pages where content is not easily accessible to a user in the transition of the mobile search results.
You can see the Search Engine Land illustration below to see examples of interstitials that make content less accessible to your website visitors.
6. Malware or suspicious code on your website
Google seems to take every action to ensure that their users' browsing experience is very safe with them and therefore they would not like to send people to those websites that have malware, hacking, trojan or other types of suspicious code.
Recently, Google has started to notify website owners of the possible malware attacks on their website through Google Search Console accounts. If you notice Google's malware warning in your GWT account, it's time to remove the problematic code from your website.
7. Keyword Overuse Keyword Overuse
is the process of optimizing a page by repeating the exact same keyword too many times. It can certainly negatively impact your search rankings.
Here is a simple example of keyword filing.
As you can see above, the keyword 'product marketing' is used 5 times within one paragraph. Google easily recognizes such common search terms and does not rank such pages because they are NOT helpful to the readers.
What's the point of using the exact same keyword within a page too often? It will not help your website audience.
Instead of keyword filing, use relevant keywords (LSI keywords) along with long tail keywords as it helps you optimize your posts naturally for better search engine rankings.
8. Lost Backlinks
Another obvious reason why your website rankings may have dropped in Google search results is that you've lost backlinks.
Whether you know it or not, Google gives top priority to links. It gives top positions on the pages with more links (preferably high quality and relevant links). So if you've lost backlinks recently, you may see a traffic drop.
Check your website for lost backlinks over the past 90 days using SEO tools like SEMrush, Serpstat etc. The
The majority of small scale websites rely heavily on some backlinks they have gained over time to their website to maintain page rank and rankings on Google.
It is very possible that your website rankings on many targeted keywords will drop because links for your website will be removed from there or the value of a link from such sources will be reduced or disappear completely in Google eyes.
If you blog in a competitive industry, you should continue to build high-quality backlinks to your website regularly from a variety of sources. You shouldn't think about stopping link building activities for your website. Check out these advanced link building strategies if you want to build quality links.
9. Hidden Text Manipulation
Do you use hidden text or links to manipulate Google? Google is smart enough to catch hidden text, and using hidden text or links violates Google's guidelines.
Google bots get more intelligent with every update, and they can easily find the hidden text section on your website even if you tried to hide it with certain CSS tricks. If you accidentally add hidden text to your website, delete it immediately.
According to Google, this is what contains hidden text or links;
Use white text on a white background Place
text behind an image Use
CSS to move text outside the screen
Set the font size to 0
Hide a link by linking only one small character (for example, a hyphen in the middle of a paragraph)
Avoid disguising . Cloaking is the practice of offering different content to bots and search engine users. So there will be differences in the actual content that you will be offering to Google bots and users of your website. If you're thinking of fooling search engine bots through such practices, stop doing them as it could lead to a Google fine.
10. Doing Buying links
excessive link exchange orIf you do excessive link exchange that can be exchanged in two or three ways or otherwise, you are breaking Google's quality guidelines. To stay on the safe side, you should stay away from link exchange practices and if you need to do link exchange do so with very few and most trusted websites in your niche.
Aside from excessive link exchange, you should also buy links. Since Google automatic programs detect that you are involved in buying or selling related activities, they will place a heavy fine or even a ban on your website.
Here are some more reasons that can lead to a Google fine.
Grab Your 30 Days FREE SEMrush Pro Account ($ 99.95 Value)
Thin Affiliate Website: Thin Affiliate sites are sites that have little or no original content. People who manage such websites plan to make money selling various affiliate products through their websites.
Usually they just copy and paste the content from websites they are connected to such as Amazon, ClickBank, eBay etc. All search engines will quickly detect the quality of your website content and you will face fines and prohibitions.
Read: Keyword density: should you still be concerned about it
Server-related errors: If Google bots are having trouble opening your website or it is taking too long to respond, it can be problematic. If your website has been unavailable for some time, it shouldn't be too much of a problem. But if your website is down for many days without the correct server response code, you may notice a drop in the ranking of your website on Google.
Have you noticed a traffic drop corresponding to a Google update? You can fix this as follows.
Do you notice a traffic drop on your websites? Do you see a sudden drop in traffic at night? This may be mainly due to a Google update.
If you notice a traffic drop related to an update to the Google algorithm, here's how to fix it so you can get your search traffic back.
Step 1: Investigate Everything First
Check if your website is suffering from Google updates like Panda, Penguin and others (you can use Google punishment checking tools already mentioned above).
Make sure to find out what's causing a traffic drop on your website.
So keep an eye out for the following and analyze
traffic drops on the individual pages of your website (did you only see a traffic drop on specific pages like your high traffic pages?)
Traffic drops on specific keywords
a huge traffic drop in general (there is definitely something error with your site)
a large number of your website pages are de-indexed from Google Search (always keep an eye on your indexed pages)
find out if your entire website is deindexed from Google search results (probably due to violation by Google)
Once you know How your site is affected by Google updates, you can work on the right areas to fix the issues you can fix from the penalties.
A common reason for traffic drop on any website is due to technical issues including the following.
Site audits can help you so much here. We strongly recommend that you use the SEMrush site audit feature to find and fix your website technical related issues to recover from any Google penalties.
Looking for a free trial of the SEMrush tool? You can use the following link to try this great SEO tool for free for 30 days.
Try SEMrush Free 30 days worth $ 99.95
We highly recommend that you try the SEMrush site audit feature as you will get an in-depth analysis of your technical or SEO related issues (so you can easily troubleshoot these issues and find and solve them).
This is what the SEMrush site audit looks like;
As you can see above, the SEMrush site audit tool gives your website a total health score by recording;
Errors
Warnings
Notices
It also gives you reports on all the problems that your website is currently having, including;
Searchability issues
https issues
Internal linking issues
Site performance and the list goes on
Step 2: Make sure your website traffic is not due to external factors;
Here are some external factors you can check for
All changes to your site (like making changes to robots.txt files, installing new plugins, changing your CSS code and so on)
GSC warnings (go go to Google Search Console and see if any warnings and malware issues appear)
Design related changes (have you recently made changes to your design or installed a new theme or completely rebranded your site's design?)
So make sure you find out if the traffic drop is the result of recent changes that you have made to your site either knowingly or unknowingly.
Step 3: Understand and work according to the Google fine
The best way to fix a penalized website is to first determine which fine caused the problem or the traffic drop.
If you're curious about the most common updates (along with recent updates from Google), here is a list of some. We will also briefly discuss how to fix these updates.
: Google Fred UpdateGoogle Fred Update is primarily targeting and penalizing those sites that apply black hat SEO tactics to aggressively monetize their pages. It includes excessive use of ads, thin content and so on. The best way to avoid getting punished by this update is to limit your ad usage and provide more value to your website users.
Google Mobilegeddon Update: Mobile Friendly This update is all about rewarding sites that respond to mobile and punishing sites that aren't. Make your WordPress sites mobile friendly and you are safe from these updates.
RankBrain Update from Google: RankBrain is a machine-learning artificial intelligence (AI) system introduced by Google in 2015. Rankbrain helps Google incorporate some of its search results into particularly rare or unique searches and it is also the 3rd most important ranking factor after content and backlinks.
Panda update from Google: Panda updates mainly concern thin content-producing websites. These updates are aimed at rewarding the sites with high quality content and lowering the rankings of those sites with mediocre or duplicate content.
Penguin Update from Google: This update mainly addresses links on your website. If your site has too many toxic links or spammy links, your site may show less in the search results. So always keep an eye on your backlink profile and remove all harmful links.
Exact Match Domain (EMD): It has been released to rank the rankings of those exact match domains that were top on Google due to a keyword rich domain name.
DMCA Penalty: Google recently started taking DMCA complaints seriously against a website. They are going to penalize those websites that receive various requests for copyright infringement.
Google optimization fine: If you get a lot of links to your website with the same anchor text, you may get a fine for Google optimization.
Google BERT Update: BERT affects 1 in 10 of all searches. This is the biggest change in the search since Google released RankBrain. BERT stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. BERT helps to better understand the nuances and context of words in search queries and to tailor those queries to more relevant results.
Google Core Update: This was probably the most important Google update in recent times and most sites, including major publications like the Daily Mail, CCN etc., publicly said how badly this update affected them.
Hot tip: always the latest Google Algorithm Updates keep an eye on from Search Engine Journal (Search Engine Journal always keeps track of the latest algorithm updates). So it's a good idea to bookmark their page to see for the latest updates from Google. Moz also does the same (you can check it from here).
Step 4: It
After you've cleaned up any activity that violates Google's quality guidelines, it's time to submit a review request to Google. When submitting this request, you must state the steps you have taken and ensure that you will not violate quality guidelines in the future.
Many requests for review are sent to Google every day, so it may take several weeks for your request to be processed. This request will only help if your website has been banned on Google, and if your website received a certain level of fine from Google, they will be automatically removed over time once you have taken the required actions.
Meanwhile, you should continue to publish high-quality and comprehensive content on your website. You should also work on building some high quality backlinks for your website focused pages with natural looking anchor texts.
Read: The Ultimate Multiple Keyword Ranking Guide Using LSI Keywords
Frequently Asked Questions About Google Sanctions and Recovery
Here is a list of some important and frequently asked questions about Google sanctions, Google updates and their recovery tips.
4. How do you know if you were hit with a Google penalty?
The best way to know if your site is penalized with a Google fine is to check your website traffic, general search rankings, conversions and so on. If you have lost a significant amount of traffic in a short period of time, it could be due to an update of the Google algorithm.
Check for recent Google algorithm updates and see if you see a traffic drop during that period. Also perform site audits to see all technical and SEO related issues on your site.
What is the Google Panda update about?
The Google Panda update was introduced in 2011 to crack on websites that contain thin and mediocre content, excessive ad usage, poor website design and so on. The main goal of Google Panda update was to reward websites that produce high quality content and reduce Google Search websites that produce thin, low quality content.
5. What are the best tools that can help you recover from Google fines?
Here are some of the best SEO tools that can help you with site audits, find and fix your Google penal issues on your site.
SEMrush (highly recommended tool)
Serpstat Search Console Google-
(check for warnings and other site issues like searchability issues) then
Final thoughts on recovering Google penalties
If you have already lost traffic due to Google algorithm updates, first diagnose the issues. Is it because of low quality content, toxic links or something else? Then you can start troubleshooting those problems to recover from Google fines.
Do you have any questions about Google sanctions? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
No comments: