It’s not a rare thing that you hear that a site is “suffering” from Google Penalty.

I had a lot of clients contacting me because they had their sites penalized by Google, and lost all of their rankings except for maybe few keywords that no one wants to rank for anyway…

In this post i will tell you more about Google Penalties and how to check if your site is affected.
Lets begin!

Google Penalty definition

One of the definitions could be: “The Google Penalty is an action taken by “Google” according to its search algorithms or manual actions against your website (or its rankings on google search pages rather)”. Usage of Black Hat SEO techniques is the usual suspect.

There are many other definitions, but our clients are more concerned about their site loosing rankings. Thankfully there are many actions you can take in order to remove the mentioned penalty!

Difference between Google penalties and filters.

In short, google filter is a part of the google’s main algorithm (such as Panda), which can by used to suppress your site on google search results, if the site has low quality in the eyes of Panda (and it is an automated action).
Google penalty is a manual action, rather than automated (which is the case with filters), on the google’s side.

How do i check if my site is affected?

To check if your site has a Google Penalties, please login to Search Console (Webmaster Tools) and navigate to: SEARCH TRAFFIC / MANUAL ACTIONS if you are using the Old Search Console (as shown at the image below).

How to check for Google Penalties using Old Webmaster Tools

If you are using the new Search Console, navigate to: SECURITY & MANUAL ACTIONS / MANUAL ACTIONS (take a look at the image below).

Check for Google Penalties using new (Report) Search Console

Hope this helps you understand Google Penalties (and filters) better!
In the next post, i will show share with you the list of the most common types of Google (filtering) Penalties, and the difference between them. You will also learn how to get rid of them!

Further reading: Learn more about SEO.