4 Google Penalty Flags : Have You Been Penalized by Google

Google is believed to apply a variety of filters to sites that fail to follow their TOS. More often than not, if you correct all errors, you will be forgiven and filters will be removed (even with no reconsideration request required).

The major problem is, webmasters might be completely unaware of the fact the site is filtered or under penalty. They might be unaware of (internal) duplicate content problem, notorious bad neighborhood problems or “over-optimization” issues. The possible issues might be numerous and they can be totally invisible even to an SEO-savvy person.

So here are a few flags that might mean your site is forced to have lower rankings than it deserves due to the penalty or filter:

1. Sudden Google referral traffic drop (or sudden loss of major rankings). As discussed earlier this change may be applied to the whole site (which might mean the problem is in the external backlinks) or to a single page (which means you should look for the problem internally). Similarly, the change may effect all your major terms or only a few of them.

2. Huge differences in rankings if you query general search and a single database. This one is not confirmed officially but some webmasters notice that their site rankings are much lower in general google.com search than when checking a separate database directly.

3. Your domain is not #1 for [yourdomain.com] search. Note that this can be a sign of some issue only for established sites – new sites can be found nowhere for the domains search quite naturally.

4. [site:yourdomain.com] returns 0 results (again, for established, prior indexed sites). This flag is the most dangerous one: it might mean some dramatic error on your side (you might have mixed something up with Robots.txt, robots meta tags or redirects) or you might have done something really bad. In this case, reconsideration request is your only hope, I am afraid.