Find out if you have a Google Penalty
Update: I forgot to mention, one really good way to check if you’ve been given a BIG penalty. Do a search for your homepage URL (“affiliatethoughts.com” if it was this site). If you’re not listed first, Google really isn’t friends with you.
Understandably people can become very anxious when they’re rank drops in Google. They often feel they have been hit by a penalty. I was one of those people a few months ago. I got my website back on track in the end. If you’re in that situation try to relax. I’m going to tell you how I fixed the problem, and if you want it badly enough you can fix the problem too.
First of all you need to determine if you really have a Google penalty. Ask yourself the following questions:
Have you been deindexed? Was your site in the index but is now entirely missing?
If you search for the URL of your homepage, does your website show up? If not, it could just be a bug. Try again tomorrow and/or from another computer so that you are connecting to a different Google data centre. If you’re still not showing up (but you were in the past), the bad news is you’ve been deindexed. The good news is I had the same problem and fixed it. This is what my rankings looked like from just before my deindexing, to just after being reincluded:
| 30-Apr | 04-May | 05-May | 06-May | 11-May | 14-May | 18-May | 19-May | 20-May |
| 3 | 3 | 3 | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| 21-May | 23-May | 29-May | 01-Jun | 07-Jun | 11-Jun | 18-Jun | 19-Jun | 20-Jun |
| - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | 22 |
| 24-Jun | 28-Jun | 01-Jul | 03-Jul | 06-Jul | 08-Jul | 09-Jul | ||
| 7 | 5 | 17 | 15 | 5 | 5 | 5 |
If you have been deindexed, you can skip the rest of this page and read about how to get reindexed. If not, you may have a smaller penalty, keep reading.
Are your bad rankings just temporary?
First of all, don’t panic (I know it’s easier said than done). Rankings often have a temporary drop, especially if you’ve made changes to your site such as updating your title tag. Here’s an example of a random temporary rank drop I experienced for a particular keyword:
| 30-Nov | 01-Dec | 02-Dec | 03-Dec | 04-Dec | 05-Dec | 06-Dec | 07-Dec | 08-Dec |
| 7 | 6 | 8 | 134 | 134 | 125 | 125 | 130 | 124 |
| 09-Dec | 10-Dec | 11-Dec | 12-Dec | 13-Dec | 14-Dec | 15-Dec | 16-Dec | |
| 120 | 112 | 107 | 111 | 115 | 6 | 8 | 7 |
Here’s how to test if it is just a temporary drop. Search for your keyword, find your listing and click the “Cached” version of your site. At the top of the page you should see “This is Google’s cache of www.yoursite.com. It is a snapshot of the page as it appeared on…” note the date down so you will know when the cache has updated. Until then your rank is unlikely to change much. Once the cache has updated you will hopefully return close to your original position, if not, keep reading.
Was your former higher rank just temporary?
As rankings can randomly drop, they can also randomly improve for a short time. If your rank was only high for a week and is now lower, you likely haven’t been penalized; you’ve just been put back in your place.
Was your site in a stable position for over a month and has suddenly dropped by more than two pages?
A new site will often bounce around the search results. Here are the daily search rankings for a specific keyword for one of my latest website;
| 17-Sep | 22-Sep | 27-Sep | 05-Oct | 06-Oct | 07-Oct | 08-Oct | 10-Oct |
| 12 | 13 | 26 | 17 | 19 | 25 | 9 | 23 |
You can see these rankings are up and down like a yo-yo. This doesn’t mean a penalty has been applied. So if your results are looking like this, don’t worry. Just carry on with what you’re doing, and your rank will settle down after a few weeks.
Have you made any dramatic changes to your website recently?
It might be the case that you have simply made your website less search engine friendly. If you have made changes to your site’s structure, navigation, title tags or any other large alteration to the page which is not ranking where it once was, this could have caused your rank to drop because you inadvertently effected your search engine optimisation.
Have you lost any important backlinks?
If you’re aware of where your most important backlinks came from, check they’re are still up. If they have been removed or nofollowed for whatever reason, contact the website owner and try to get them back. If the links are still there, it could be a penalty.
Have you checked robots.txt?
I have a friend who thought he had a Google penalty for 6 months before realising he’d forgotten to let the Google bot crawl his site. Make sure you’re not making the same mistake. Robot.txt lets you tell search engines if you don’t want them to index your site. Check www.yoursite.com/robots.txt. If get a page that mentions “file not found” and/or “404” you don’t have a robots.txt file and so it isn’t preventing Google from coming to your website. If you get a page with anything else on it, check http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard#Examples to see if your robot.txt file is set up correctly.
If you’ve answered all the questions and still feel you have a penalty, it’s time to make some changes and let Google know what changes you’ve made. Find out how by reading about how to get reindexed with Google.