When you see unexpectedly drop your website traffic and see a comparing decrease in your keyword rankings, there is a probability that you are on the receiving the Google penalty. according to the Google report in 2014 that over one lakh manual actions are taken against the sites each month by their webspam team, and that is extremely just a small amount of total number. lots of different websites are punished when Google updates their new algorithm like Panda and Penguin.
How To Identify Penalized Your Site?
Follow these steps
1. Use Google Webmaster Tools (Search Console)
Google webmaster tool or Search Console is a medium, by using this tool Google communicate to the webmaster if anything happens wrong like crawling mistake, 404 pages, Manual penalties, malware identified, and more.
There are two types of penalties…
1. Manual Penalty: Manual penalties are the Google method of removing or downgrading the websites as a whole. they are not related to Google Algorithm changes like Panda and Penguin or other. they are essentially Google manually penalize for spammy activities.
At the point when this is the situation, Google will give you a sign of what the issues are together with the list of activities you can sort out the issues. once you make the necessary changes you can send a reconsideration message and they will inform you if the penalties have been removed or not.
2. Algorithmic Penalty: This is the automatic Google penalty. It is not reported to the webmaster tools and there is no chance to fill in a reconsideration message or request. The only way to identify if your website hit by the automatic penalty is to apply the method.
This penalty is a result of the frequency changes Google is making to its ranking algorithms.
Login to your webmaster tools and press the button “Search Traffic” and then “Manual Action” here you can see your manual penalties.
After clicking the “Manual Action” button and you see a message “No manual webspam actions found” It means your site not penalized by manual action but you need to check your site is not penalized by the algorithm penalty.
2. Login to Google Analytics and review your Google traffic
This is a free web analytics tool provided by Google, through this tool you can analyze your website traffic statics with the complete picture of your visitor and their needs. it still provides an overall health report on your website.
Login to your Google Analytics Tool and press “Audience” and then “Overview” and check your traffic graph.
And then go to the “Acquisition” then “All Traffic” then “Source/Medium” here you can check your Organic website traffic.
Check your old and current traffic status by date if you see a drop in your traffic during the dates that means Google released an algorithm and that’s the reason your web traffic dropped.
3. You can use the SearchMetrics tool
This tool provides a snapshot of your site’s search visibility over some stretch of time. Search metric allows you to pinpoint when issues happened, giving you a superior idea of what changes occurred during that time, and how to settle them. This tool offers a premium membership for clients who require a bigger era displayed, yet there is a free version for the individuals who just need to go back a couple of months.
How long do you penalties hold?
A manual penalty is in actuality until the point when you submit and effectively pass a reconsideration request or until they expire. A few google penalties may hold for a half year while we perused of cases that penalties stay for two years before they time out or expire.
Just to make it clear that if the manual penalty timeout or expires, this doesn’t mean that that the site is perfect and will recover the traffic and ranking. It just means that the penalties are never again appearing in webmaster tools but if you didn’t do anything to sort out the issues, the site will most probably be gotten by the automatic penalties and still be hit.
When you are hit by the change in the ranking algorithm, you should take restorative measures as quickly as time permits and wait for the next algorithm release to see if you recovered or not. There are few cases that recovery can be faster as there algorithmic changes that are continuous but in the majority of the cases, you will have to wait for the next algorithm update to see if the progressions you made are delivering positive outcomes.
Recent year Google algorithm updates, and What They Targeted
Panda – 2011
Panda updated for priority the high-quality site and punish low-quality websites in the Google organic search page. it means panda update punish which website they have low-quality content, plagiarism, irrelevant, and keyword stuffing. this update is also known as “Farmer”.
Penguin – 2012
Penguin targeted low-quality backlinks. this update goal was to eliminate the website were using automatic link building software, purchasing links, or obtaining low-quality backlinks.
Hummingbird – 2013
The main goal of the Hummingbird update was to create a more stable searching system for the users by understanding the human voice and getting away from random searching keywords.
Since many users use their mobile device or voice recognition devices for the searching, the update made it simple and easy for those users to ask any query.
Pirate 2.0 – October 2014
This was the important update that was based on the first Pirate update. This takeoff was to break down significantly harder against online piracy, the illegal replicating of copyrighted and authorized materials from the web.
The update would affect any site that violated Google DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) and would get a noteworthy drop in ranking or would sometimes be totally expelled or removed from the Search Engine Result Pages.
This update was so instrumental and compelling that a few sites lost SEO visibility of 98 percent. The pirate update is imperative to note because as we are advancing in an “Instantly share” online community, you should be careful about what you are sharing and if you are authorized to do as such.
Mobilegeddon – Aprile 2015
Google made an official declaration that they would grow their utilization of mobile-friendliness as the ranking signals. this update would influence all the mobile searches in all languages worldwide and also majorly affect their search results.
This update was to guarantee that all the users find it less complex to get relevant, top-quality search results and that it was enhanced for their gadget or device.
Along with the Mobilegeddon update, Google declared that they will consider indexed apps as a search ranking factor for the users that are marked-in and already have the apps installed. Index apps is a component that allows the users to go directly into the application from the search results.
Mobile-Friendly – May 2016
As mobile phones and PCs became turned into a more popular method for searching the net as opposed to laptop or desktop searching, Google made an update in Q2 of 2016 that would mirror that. Expounding on the “Mobilegeddon” The mobile-friendly-2 update was an official declaration made by the Google expressing that they would reveal an update to mobile search results. it would increase the effect of the web ranking signal in order to help the users find not only the most relevant pages as well as ones that are mobile-friendly too.
Possum – September 2016
possum is important to improve your local SEO efforts. meaning, if you are looking for a mobile repairs shop, you must have a web page that indicates that. Actually, this was another unconfirmed update, all evidence appeared to point towards “possum” affecting the ranking in the “three-pack” or “local pack” in the google search results.
The three-pack is the best three organizations that appear in your Google search results in the geographical area. in order for the businessman to have their possibility at this, Google launched the possum. the principal driver behind this update was to diversify the local (nearby) result along with prohibiting spam from the ranking.
FRED (unconfirmed) – March 8, 2017
Numerous trust that this update was focused on “black hat SEO practices” and a spam algorithm update was executed including backlinks on non-expert industry sites. a significant number of the sites negatively affected seem to carry typical theme: low-esteem content with affiliate link spread throughout. these sites were posting pages on the wide variety of the topics plus include links but not adding the value to what has just been written by other websites in the industry.