If you notice a serious drop in traffic on your website or it falls off the top rankings on search engines, it may be due to Google applying a penalty to your site for violating their guidelines and standards. In this article, Optimal Agency will share how to check if a website is penalized by Google.
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What is a website penalized by Google?
Also known as Google Penalty, it is a sanction imposed by Google when a website violates the rules. When receiving a penalty from Google, part or all of your website does not appear on Google’s search results and drops suddenly in the SERPs.
This happens because Google detects that you are spamming or manipulating Google in any way, such as excessive keyword optimization,… When penalized by Google, your website seems to freeze and lose value. To regain trust, many actions must be taken and it takes a lot of time, and it may even be very difficult to achieve the results as initially.
A website is penalized by Google often shows signs like keywords dropping significantly, traffic plummeting unusually and quickly. Your website name is no longer on the ranking board, the number of indexed articles is severe reduced, and the indexing speed is also slower. Moreover, the Pagerank score drops sharply due to the impact from the backlink system, etc.
Google penalties have two main types with different penalty levels and handling methods. Manual penalties originate from Google’s quality evaluators. That is, if you do something shady to try to improve your website’s ranking, you may be penalized by Google. Typically, you will receive an email notification about the error and can rectify it quickly.
Algorithmic penalties by Google are applied to websites of low quality and fail to meet those algorithms. Website admin will not receive any notifications when penalized by Google. This means you need to spend a lot of time and effort to check and identify your penalty.
How to check if a website is penalized by Google?
Every penalty that Google imposes significantly affects the operation of the website. Therefore, businesses need to detect whether their website is penalized and come up with appropriate remedies:
Use Google Search Console
You can check for any warnings or notifications from Google about whether your website is penalized. Log into your Google Search Console account, go to the “Security and Manual Actions” section in the left toolbar, and select “Manual Actions.” Then, check if there is a notification from Google on the main screen.
Note: If your website is algorithmically penalized, you will not see a penalty notification in Google Search Console.
Check Traffic via Google Analytics
If you notice a significant drop in website traffic or a sudden decline, it could be due to Google detecting fraudulent behavior and penalizing the website. At this time, check whether Google has recently updated any algorithms and then recheck your website’s traffic in Google Analytics from the time the algorithm update was completed. If the website is really penalized, you need to understand the new algorithm and adjust accordingly.
Check Index on Google
You can access Google and search using the syntax “site:domain”. The results will display all URLs on your website that Google has indexed. If no URLs appear or the number of URLs decreases suddenly, your website has been penalized and Google has removed the index of articles on the site. So we have to find out How to make Google index quickly. This is one of the simple ways to check if your website is penalized by Google.
Check Google PageRank
PageRank (PR) is one of the important indicators to assess a website based on Backlink. You can check this index by visiting the link: https://checkpagerank.net/check-page-rank.php and entering your domain in the blank box. If PR drops suddenly, it may be that your website has been penalized by Google.
Use SEO Tools
To assess the operation of the website and check various indexes, you can use tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, MOZ,… Important indexes you should pay attention to when using Ahrefs are DR (Domain Rating) and UR (URL Rating), backlinks, and Referring Domains. It’s normal if these indexes are stable and do not show significant fluctuations. However, if these indexes change suddenly, it may be that your website is being penalized by Google.
Check Hosting
There are two reasons why your website may be penalized by Google: hosting expiration and full hosting capacity.
To check whether hosting is expired, log into your hosting and click on Services, then select My Service; after that, there will be a frame with the expiration date or an option to renew. Note to check your email regularly as the provider often sends renewal reminders 15-30 days before the expiration date.
Each hosting package provides a certain capacity, and when the hosting capacity is full, it causes your website to be slow, decreasing the page loading speed. To check the hosting capacity, log into your hosting management and click on Resource Usage in the top right corner to check the capacity.
Check Google’s Blacklist
Some unsafe websites are blacklisted by Google. To check if your website is on that list, visit the link: https://transparencyreport.google.com/safe-browsing/search. Then enter your domain in the Check site status section and press Enter to get the results.
Check for duplicate content
If you copy content or generate it using automatic content creation tools, Google is highly likely to penalize your website. Moreover, skimpy articles on the website with low-quality content and little value to readers can easily violate Google’s guidelines.
Google’s algorithms are constantly upgraded to detect and filter out low-quality websites to provide the best results for users. If you want to see if content is ignored by Google due to duplication, add &filter=o at the end of your article’s URLs and search on Google. Additionally, you can use plagiarism checking tools such as copyscape.com, spineditor.com, etc.
Check the robots.txt file
The robots.txt file is a simple text file (.txt) that is part of the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP) containing a set of web standards that regulate how web robots collect data on the web, access, index content, and provide that content to users, ensuring that your website will be crawled and indexed.
By using a robots.txt file checker, you will know whether your robots.txt files are correct. If you find any issues, quickly remove and correct them immediately. Also, check whether the Meta robots tags are set to Noindex or Nofollow.
Why a website is penalized by Google?
After learning how to check if your website is penalized by Google, let’s explore the reasons and solutions. There are many reasons why websites are penalized by Google, but they mainly stem from violations of Google’s rules and algorithms. Often, many websites receive penalties from Google after algorithm updates aimed at improving quality and dealing with low-quality and rule-circumventing websites.
Spam
This is a serious offense when your website violates Google’s quality rules: copying content from other websites, producing skimpy, low-quality content, or using deceptive techniques to boost website rankings. Or, you might be trying to quickly increase content and traffic without creating original content.
To remedy this, you should stop these actions and repair them by developing a plan to create high-quality content that provides value to readers. Also, revise your spamming techniques and request a reconsideration from Google.
Duplicate content
Many SEOers, wanting to increase the amount of content indexed on the page or to bulk up the website’s content, copy content from other websites on the same topic. With this duplicate content issue, the penalty from Google might affect the website’s ranking. Google could completely remove the website from its index, and it will not appear in search results.
The solution to this issue is to create more original content for your website. Invest in quality content that provides value to readers and publish it on your website. Additionally, you need to recheck all content using plagiarism checking tools and make necessary edits.
Unnatural links to the website
To optimize SEO and increase the ranking of the website on Google’s search results page, many SEOs engage in link exchanges and purchases to boost keyword rankings and PageRank. This means Google will notice you and, naturally, you will receive penalties from Google.
If you are penalized by Google for this reason, stop buying and exchanging unnatural links. Instead, plan to build an effective backlink system for your page.
Too many backlinks
Backlinks play a very important role in SEO optimization. If your website increasingly has quality backlinks pointing to it, the better your chances of being ranked higher by Google. That’s why many people buy backlinks in bulk for their websites without caring about quality.
To solve this, you need to review all the links you have built and directed to your website. Whether you did backlinking poorly or were sabotaged by competitors. Check this in the section of links to your website in Google Search Console. Moreover, plan to backlink effectively, focusing on quality over quantity.
Low-quality external links
Your website links out to other low-quality websites unrelated to the main content of your website. This affects the user experience and is one of the reasons why Google imposes penalties on your website.
To address this issue, you need to build an effective backlink plan. Only link to reputable and high-quality websites, related pages that are not your competitors. Only then will your website rank high on SERPs and provide the best user experience.
Through this article, you now know how to check if your website is penalized by Google. We hope it will help you in developing SEO for your website to achieve the best results.
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FAQ
There are several signs that your website is penalized by Google. For example: a sudden drop in search engine rankings. Or you receive a notification in Google Search Console about Google’s manual review process if your website violates their guidelines. If you see a significant drop in website traffic, that is also a sign of being penalized.
The recovery time of a website can vary depending on the severity of the penalty and your ability to resolve the issue. Manual penalties are issued when Google’s moderation team manually evaluates a website suspected of manipulating rankings through backlink purchases.
The duration of the penalty will be determined based on the level and severity of the violation. This period could be just 10 days for a minor violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines or longer for serious violations. Manual penalties will expire after a prescribed period. Your website might be affected by both an algorithm update and manual penalties.
