How to Check if Your Website is Penalized by Google

How to Check if a Website is Penalized by Google
There are always a question asked by all webmasters that how to check whether your website is being penalized by Google or not?

Here are few points to let you verify that your website is a victim of Google penalization or not.

Keyword Rankings:

You were top on result for some of your keywords and you see a major and sudden drop in all those keywords. This indicates that your website is probably being penalized by Google because your Google SERP is very down.

Number of Page Index:

Large numbers of pages from your website were there in Google before when check using site: operator and now when you use site: operator, you are seeing very few pages. Most of your pages are no more in Google index. This major de-index also indicate that your website is in trouble.

Page Weight Loss:

If you see that your pages are there in Google when you use site: operator. Next thing to check is the weight of these pages. Even if these pages are there in Google index. They are not appearing in search results or appearing very last in results when you give complete post title plus your blog or website name.

For ex. Secret of Google + GoogleTips, where "Secret of Google" is the keyword you are searching for and "GoogleTips" is the name of your blog or website.

Google Cache:

Google Cache is another way to find if your website is being penalized by Google or not. Normally Google put every website on internet to its cache and this cache updates depend on many factor related to a website. Normally for popular websites like CNN, Washington Post, TechCrunch, you will find the date of last cache is current date or just one day back.

If you check your website with cache: operator in Google and find the date of last cached is too old, it means Google is not showing interest in your website anymore. Most likely it's a penalization.

Complete De-index:

This is the simplest way to check for Google penalization. When your site is completely de-indexed by Google and it's no more in Google either with info: operator or with site: operator.

Number of Backlinks:

Few days back, when you checked your website, Google was showing thousands of backlinks of your website and now link: operator is showing a huge drop in number of backlinks. If this is the case, then it's the possibility of Google penalization.

Index Time:

Index time is another factor by which you can check for penalization. Before penalization, new posts from your website were getting indexed in hours and now they are taking a week to get indexed. This is a clear sign of Google penalization or Google is getting in trouble indexing your website.

Google PageRank:

Google PageRank is a value attached to your website. You may see a drop in your PageRank value if Google has penalized you for any reason. Before few days, if your PageRank value was say 4 and now it’s become 2. It’s very obvious that Google has penalized your website.

Wait for Google Mail:

Google always send mail when it finds something harmful in your website. Google will de-index all those pages which are having problem and will inform you to fix the problem. Once you fix the problem, you can easily come back in Google search index.

Important words used in this article-

link: operator - If used with your website, provide you the number of backlinks to your website.

info: operator - If used with your website, provide you the information of your website in Google.

site: operator - If used with your website, provide you the number of pages indexed in Google search from your website.