The constant changes in the Google algorithm cause a lot of rise and fall in website rankings on the search engine results page. Due to this reason, many webmasters are confused to see the changed positions of their websites and wonder their websites have been penalized or not. They are not able to determine whether to consider this drop in their ranking on search engines as the consequence of a Google penalty or just an effect of the change in the Google algorithm.

The first way to find the answer of this question is to ask yourself whether you have been using any unethical search engine optimization strategies or Black Hat Techniques. You must be the best person to know of any activities that you have performed for optimizing your website which goes against the norms recommended in any of Google’s webmaster guidelines. Answers to these questions have a direct relation with Google penalties which would typically be the consequence of such activities.

In order to find out whether your website has been penalized, check out the server downtimes, and other technical issues which might cause hindrances in getting your website indexed. Take a look at the log files and compare the user activity in your website for the past few weeks. Penalties would cause a drop in the website position drastically which, in turn, will affect the amount of traffic visiting your website. Also, verify the search engine referrals. It might take you around two months to investigate whether your website has been penalized. Usually, the referrals remain consistent even with the primary keyword fluctuating between the top 30 positions. However, if the keyword is position has dropped in both the ranking and the referrals, your website might have been penalized.
An overall deterioration in ranking, visibility, traffic, back-linking, indexed page number all indicate some problem, especially if you find a big difference when compared to the past performance of the same aspects.

If your website is penalized then it means that its ranking has gone down but it is still there is Google. On the other hand, if your website is banned Google removes it completely from Google and it is not visible in Google search index.

You can subscribe to RSS feeds to monitor the pages that are there in Google. If you find the number of those pages are dropping then it might indicate a problem. To track penalties, you use Google analytics to set up custom reports. The report is generated in the form of PDF files which contains graphs of the website’s daily performance. These graphs clearly indicate changes in the traffic patterns on a day to day basis.

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