How to know if a website is penalized in Google

Among all the functions that having a website for any business, service, personal blog or informational topic provides , one of the most important is visibility . Obviously, anyone who decides to publish their content on a website does so because they want that content to reach a recipient , but sometimes things get complicated. It can be due to many factors that I am going to classify today, telling you how to know if a website is penalized by Google.

SEO work within websites is becoming increasingly important. It is a meticulous and slow job, which yields results in the medium to long term. But as in all disciplines, mistakes can be made that cause fatal consequences for positioning and visibility. To avoid making them, and prevent penalties, stay until the end of this post.

What does it mean when a website is penalized by Google?

A Google penalty is a sanction imposed by the search engine on a website because it violates some of the rules it has set. Normally, this type of penalty can be perceived as a drop in visits .

A Google penalty will always lead to a drop in traffic, but a drop in traffic does not necessarily have to be due to a Google penalty.

Types of penalties

There are several ways to penalize websites based on the multiple factors that Google takes into account when classifying a website as negative for the user and therefore deserving of one of its sanctions.

Penalties based on the level of sanction

Keyword Penalty

URL or Directory Sanction

Subdomain penalty

Sanction of the entire domain ; full domain name

Sanction of exclusion from the index

Penalties depending on the type of sanction

Algorithmic penalties

These types of penalties are carried out automatically due to the way Google's algorithm works . Algorithms are updated, changed and evolved over time, so it is important to stay up to date with how they work since no one knows for sure how they penalize.

These types of penalties are more difficult to intercept, as a thorough analysis and full audit of the website must be done to corroborate the sanction. We will go into detail later on how to detect these types of penalties .

Manual penalties

These types of sanctions are carried out manually by a Google employee, and because of this, they usually send a notice to the sanctioned website explaining the penalty imposed. After this notice, several reviews must be carried out once the necessary changes have been made to the website so that this penalty is lifted.

How to know if a website is penalized by Google

Penalty algorithms

Panda Algorithm

This algorithm is responsible for imposing a penalty on pages that do not have good quality content.

For Google, the most important thing is the user, which is why it must find valuable content taking into account their search intentions. This algorithm therefore looks for empty content within websites, information of little value or misleading content that can divert the user's search intention.

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That is, if a page does not show us the content we are looking for , but has previously led us to believe that it does, it will probably end up being penalized by the Panda algorithm.

Penguin Algorithm

This type of algorithm is responsible website development service for reviewing the quality of the links on websites to detect illegal automated linking strategies or those that do not provide quality content to the user.

This can be avoided by thoroughly reviewing the links we have on our website and always ensuring that the links are of good quality and that their content is valuable to the user.

Google Manual Penalties

In this type of penalty, you will receive a notice from one of Google's employees about the sanction imposed and the reasons why it was carried out .

You will receive a message via Google Search Console notifying you of the type of penalty and the steps that must be taken to carry out the relevant reviews and reverse the penalty.

If this happens, you must be patient , as it is necessary to review the content thoroughly and it is costly to get out of these penalties, since normally several revisions must be made until the corrections made are considered valid.  

It is important to know that you will probably have to contact Google reviewers several times to validate the website, but this will result in a much more careful structure and content and you will probably experience an increase in visibility afterwards.

Google penalties and how to avoid them

How can I tell if my website has been penalized by Google?

First, we need to confirm that we are penalized. This is not an easy task, since, in many cases, the drop in visits or visibility can be due to external factors that have nothing to do with the sanctions of this search engine.

But in order to know this and at the same time, have the tools to solve it, I am going to suggest you follow a series of steps that will be very good for your website and its positioning .

Analyze your keywords and search by time frame

It is not the same thing if visits drop drastically without any trigger, than if you analyse the traffic of the keywords on your website and see that over certain seasons they have a significant fluctuation. Sometimes keywords are more successful in certain seasons of the year for social, environmental or simply fashionable reasons. You have to take into account the keywords of your website, but also those of your sector in general. Many times, by obtaining a report of what the competition is doing, we get many more responses than we expected. With this, you should see that your keywords, for good website traffic, have to have an average pattern of increases and decreases, staying within acceptable parameters.