An interesting thread on WebmasterWorld forums discusses ways to diagnose a possible Google penalty. If you suspect your site / URL is being filtered out / penalized (e.g. you have lost some Google rankings), try doing the following: Dig your internal traffic analytics for traffic drops or bad trends; Perform [site:yoursite.com] search in Google to see if Google reports same number of indexed URLs; Check if Google Webmaster Tools report any problems; Take a look if Google toolbar PR has changed (graybar PR mightbe a signal of penalty); Check your site ranking for a “domain-name” search (without theTLD). If such a query puts you in the fifties, it’s almost (!) guaranteed to be a penalty. Check if Google has blacklisted your site as unsafe for browsing (type http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=mysite.com with your domain at the end). Check the source code for any injected links … Read entire article »