Google

Has Google penalised my site?

Google release a new tool to check if they have penalised your site

Until recently this has always been very difficult to tell. Google can penalise your site for various reasons including:

  • Buying links
  • Using hidden text ie with CSS positioning or Javascript,
  • Keyword Stuffing (that’s the process of inserting far too many keywords into your text in an effort to rank better)
  • Spam

If detected then your site would be penalised and drop in the rankings.

Now you can quickly and easily tell using Google Webmaster Tools which we assume you are using right?

To use this tool, sign into your Google Webmaster Tools account, go to the website you would like to check, click on ‘Search Traffic,’ then ‘Manual Actions.’ There you will either see nothing (meaning your website wasn’t manually penalised), or you will see a message telling you why your website was manually penalised.

For example:

How to tell if your site has been penalised by Google

Although this is very useful, Google don’t then go on to tell us how to reverse the penalty.

4 replies
  1. Lucy Goodwin
    Lucy Goodwin says:

    I am still at a loss as to why my pr went from to down to 0. I have found no manual actions at all, I did have sponsored posts with follow links and think that might be the reason, I have now changed them to no follow, do you think this could have been the reason?

    Reply
    • deadmin
      deadmin says:

      Hi Lucy,

      That’s interesting. Have you you had a look at the number and quality of your backlinks? We use a variety of tools:

      https://ahrefs.com/
      http://www.backlinkwatch.com/

      are two sites that are good to use. Have a look and see if you have seen a sudden drop in backlinks or what the quality of them is. I don’t think the follow links in your posts would have been the cause. As long as the content is good quality, relevant and on relevant sites then you should be ok.

      Does Webmaster tools show any drop in search queries recently?

      Reply
  2. Adam
    Adam says:

    Thanks for the tutorial! I’ve been wondering for sometime if my site bad been penalized but didn’t know how to check! Now I do, so thanks :)

    Reply
    • Hedley Phillips
      Hedley Phillips says:

      Hi Adam,

      glad we could help. We’ve just managed to remove a Google Manual Action on one of our customers’ sites. It took a lot of work trying to get links removed and then finally using the disavow tool but we have finally succeeded and their penalty has been removed. At some stage we will write a blog post about the process.

      Reply

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