Getting penalized by Google is probably one of the very last scenarios you want to find your website in. The months and years of effort toward building and optimizing your website for search engines could just vanish in the blink of an eye. It’s a disaster you don’t ever want to find yourself in because it could lead to a potentially huge loss of sales and income, especially if your business relies heavily on traffic from search engines.
Aside from strictly sticking to the rules Google has set and only focusing on doing ethical SEO practices, it is also extremely important for you to be vigilant on any fluctuations. Unfortunately, this is because not all bad SEO is the result of the optimization you’re performing yourself. There are occasionally malicious competitors who are more than willing to run a negative SEO campaign against your website, just to pull your rankings down in the SERPs.
If you’ve ever been unfortunate enough to receive a website penalty, the very first thing you should do is try and determine the cause of the penalty. In order to help diagnose the cause of the penalty, digital growth experts at Dallas SEO company KISS PR helped put together a list of tools for you to use and gather insight on what caused your website penalty.
Determining what specific penalty hit your website is the first step in correcting the problem. Here are the tools we suggest using that not only give you detailed information about the penalty but can also help fix your website SEO problems.
You can use this tool for free if you have a Google Analytics account. Once you’re logged in, you can see a mapping of your traffic and the specific time a Google Update went live.
In the map, there are a number of vertical lines which show you the various algorithm updates. These tell you the impact of a particular update on your traffic. To see the details, just click any of these lines. Each will show you the description of the update, the reason why it happened, and how it affects your website.
This is another very detailed resource page that can help provide you a more in-depth level of information on each algorithm update rolled out by Google.
Keep in mind that if the chart is in the green range, this means your website is okay. If it’s in the red area, it means your website is in danger of getting a penalty, and if it’s blue, your website is extremely safe and has no threats of any penalties.
See their most recent entry about the latest algorithm update that rolled out in June 2019.
This is another resource page that provides an extremely detailed history of Google algorithm changes since 2000. Each update is listed in chronological order so users can easily access the details of the specific algorithm changes they want.
If you suspect you’ve been hit by a penalty, this should be the first resource page you check to find out what penalty your website received. You can easily filter through the information by year or status (confirmed by Google or not).
This tool provides very comprehensive information on what Google has been up to in the last 30 days. It also allows you to track SERP volatility of a specific niche in the last 30 days.
SEMrush also displays top SERP features occurrence such as featured snippets, local pack, knowledge panel, top stories, instant answers, and the likes.
Once you’ve added your own site for an in-depth analysis, you can see every page and keyword you rank for and it also shows you the detailed information for your site’s SERP volatility.
This tool can tell you exactly what happened to your site. Sign up for a free account and get access to a wealth of data such as a plot graph of updates that reflect how the recent algorithm updates affect your website.
Below the plot graph, you will find more detailed information showing the recent algorithm updates with probability figures that can tell you how likely each update will affect your website traffic.
With the basic Google Penalty Checker plan, you can check two websites for Google penalties and review visual data on Google updates that impacted your websites.
Conclusion
Having access to these Google Penalty Checkers can hopefully help you determine the specifics of why your website was hit by a penalty. Once you determine the penalty, you can start fixing your SEO issues and wait until the penalty is removed by Google. If you are still unsure of where to start with your website penalty or need help in diagnosing other digital problems, get in touch with KISS PR SEO agency today for free at 239-373-5255.
Have you been hit by a Google penalty before? What tools have you used to diagnose your website? What did you do to fix it? Share your experience in the comment section below.
