Is my website penalized? Did Google dropped my rankings and excluded my pages from index due to some penalty? What is Search Engine Penalization? How to recover back my rankings ?
These are one of questions most Web Owners and webmasters have. But what exactly is the scene behind Search Engine Penalization or Search Engine Ranking Drops, this is what most SEO's and Search Specialists talk about. Recently a study has proved that Search Engines (which keep on changing their algorithms), are moving towards most user friendly environment by giving quality results. Sometime, we feel whether search engines will not let us come on top search results even if we have keyword rich Meta Tags, keyword saturated content and a search friendly web structure. But here is the thing which we totally mess up! Quality...!
Search Engines look onto different attributes like Meta specially Title of the Page, Content relevancy, user interface, internal (anchor) links and then off-page coverage as for the page to which user is being directed. The important thing is Repute and Quality of the page.
So if anything don't comply with Search Engine Fundamentals its relatively less chance for it to come on higher search positions. But what exactly causes a penalization? is mentioned as below:
- The spam activity which enforces search engines to rank a page higher even if it is not exactly what a user is looking for.
- Secondly if users are being forced to download or see a page which they don't need.
- A virus or malicious script which can cause any damage to users system or data.
- Excess use of keywords i.e. keyword stuffing.
- Irrelevant links or links from a banned site or network. Moreover, link farming.
- Violations of Search Quality Rules.
So here i would like to share some of my practices as compared to Google Standards of Search.
How to Identify, if website is penalized or not?
To check whether a site is violating with Google’s terms and conditions and to get help to manage your SEO strategy to tackle with any issues with ranking drops we need to do different quality checks. In order to be aware of penalty from search engines, you should learn how to recognize if your site has been tagged (tagged as violating search terms) and is at risk of removal from the search pages. It can be simply seen if a position of a keyword is continuously changing its position or is behaving abnormally in search engine ranking pages as a routine matter, this gives you the first chance to act quickly to minimize damage. At this stage you can simply check, what changes you have done on previous submission? also verify when the site was previously crawled, note the delay period. This will help you understand if the site is in sandbox or there are not enough changes to be crawled by search engine. Once it is confirm that there is some issue, submit a fresh sitemap with checked pages with satisfying on-page factors. Or submit a request of reconsideration and regain favor from search engines as soon as possible. The webmasters or web owner who don't take time to familiarize themselves with any early warning or intimation can waste months unaware with the fact that the keywords downfall was due to search engine filters or penalties.
Once If you feel that your website may have been penalized, try the following diagnosis:
1. Use Google Webmaster Tool: Google’s webmaster tools is one of the first ports of call when attempting to identify possible penalties. This tool clearly shows the detail of how the search spider interprets to your website, pages or content. Check reports such as the crawl errors – it may be that the page is timing out. Or check for any HTTP errors. If there are some, modify them on earliest possible.
3. Access Google’s Safe Browsing Diagnostic Report: The report informs about the search engine’s current listing status for your domain. Crucially, it mentions if the site has been identified as “suspicious” with the search engine. 
If so, then you can be pretty sure about a penalty or temporary filter as have been applied to your site, which caused keyword drop page. The Safe Browsing page also gives a report of any malicious software being downloaded or installed without user consent in the last 90 days – again, if the report flags up any software activity, a penalty is likely to be given. Suspicious web content and the hosting of malware script or software or use of the site as an intermediary for the distribution of malware is also checked and findings are reported.
To run the diagnostic enter the following in to your browser address bar — http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=www.mywebsiteurl.com. And study the report carefully.
4. Conduct Google Searches For Your Domain: Go to Google and perform different searches for your domain name. If your site is not too new, it should naturally rank number one for its URL. If not, there’s a very real possibility that your site has been penalized. To check this, you can try a site: mywebsiteurl.com search. Normally, when conducting this search, it helps to understand how many results or links are being returned as indexed data for a website. It is simply sure if the search returns 0 results or less results then your previous information. Penalty can only be given to a page, a category (section) or even a complete domain. So it should be clearly noticed that what is the scenario for your website. It can only be confirmed by matching the returned results this time with previous noted data.
If the results of these checks indicate that your website has been penalized, try to resist to make huge changes quickly, as may be the reconsideration request might help in recovering rankings. Having confirmation of your website not complying with Search Engine required standards, you’ll need to tread carefully to identify the cause of problem. Normally, possible causes include duplicate content, keyword stuffing, a large number of inbound paid links or outbound links which fall in non relevant or link farming or injection of links in source code to obvious bad neighborhood or spam sites.
Webmasters and owners of huge dynamic sites may find themselves facing two or three of these problems. The key to success here is, change things slowly one step at one time and test the impact all tuning over the course of a number of days. For non-serious infringements, the penalties will disappear automatically at the next crawl. However, in most cases you need to submit a reconsideration request to search engines as to get things working normally again.
