What is Google Penalty?

If your website’s rankings start dropping then it is the high time to be aware whether you are penalized by Google. The term ‘Google penalty’ indicates the negative impact on any site’s search rankings which is based on the updates to search algorithms or manual review by Google. It can be unfortunate for different black-hat SEO strategies.

How to Determine the Penalty?

In the scenario, the first step you should take is to determine the cause of the traffic dropping. The penalty can be due to the following reasons:

Manual Penalties-It occurs while Google’s spam algorithm is basically flagged by something on the website you have. In this case, Google determines to charge a manual penalty to the ranking of the website. These are followed by a message in your webmaster account.

Algorithm Updates-Google automatically updates its algorithm when penalties occur. A small change or series of changes in algorithm can hamper your website’s traffic. These are hard to detect because no notification is sent on webmaster tool.

Either Penguin or Panda

Be it manual or algorithm update that has affected the site’s ranking, the source is likely to be between Penguin and Panda. The Penguin targets website’s that display unnatural backlink profiles as well anchor text that is over-optimized whereas the Panda basically targets low quality duplicate content that bothers user experience.

How to Recover from the Penalty?

Well, by now you have realized that your site has been penalized by Google. So, it is the time to be active and perform actions to get away with it.

You can undertake the following actions to recover from Google penalty:
Manual-actions – Check it for the dropping site rankings.
Moz Change History – Take help of SEO Moz and go through the updates.
Penguin Tool – It helps you to quick check and see the traffic drop if coincides with an algorithm update.
Chartelligence – This Google chrome extension enables you to overlay information of various dates.