Deciphering Google-ese: How to Know if You’ve Gotten a Google Penalty

Just like women (or just like men, depending on your gender!), the ways of Google are mysterious. Deciphering its laws is full of conjecture, testing, personal experience and word of mouth. It’s almost like a religion . If you have noticed a sudden drop in your Google rankings lately, you may be wondering whether you have incurred a Google penalty. While fixing this unfortunate occurrence is a whole ‘nother set of posts, today we’ll explain how to determine the type of SEO penalty you may have suffered and point to some initial steps you can take to get your web marketing back on track.

First SEO check: Is your site still indexed?

That is, when you do a search in Google for site:www.yourbusinesswebsite.com.au, do you still see pages from your site?

If you don’t: Your site is probably banned from Google (unless it is too new to have been indexed yet). To get banned, you need to do something really awful … your mistake will probably be easy for an internet marketing specialist to identify. Get help, and file a re-inclusion request.

If you do: See below.

Second SEO check: Does your site still show up in results when you search for your domain name, or your business name within “parentheses”?

If you don’t: There may be issues with the validity of some of your links, or there may be some issues with your content that are viewed by Google as on-site spam. If you haven’t updated your site in a while, it is highly likely that SEO techniques that were acceptable back when they were implemented on your domain are now seen as black hat. Keyword stuffing is a good example, or you may have links from a site that has been found to be engaging in black hat internet marketing techniques.

If you do: See below.

Third SEO check: Do you still rank for any reasonably unique phrases within your title tags, in the top 10-20 results?

If you don’t: It may just be that links that previously held lots of weight in your link popularity equation have been devalued, for one reason or another.  Or there may have been some well-marketed competitor sites developed in your niche.

If you do: There’s no problem – you may have just noticed a drop in rankings. Get your internet marketing experts onto the case!