Is Your Site Penalized in Google?

A new thread has surfaced at the Google Groups that talks about the ways webmasters can tell if their site is penalized by Google or not. Thanks to Barry for noticing it.

One person says that “Home page will not appear unless you use site:www.domainname.com.

”JohnMu further elaborates on the whole issue:

Here's one test that seems to work about 90% of the time (only my opion after looking at thousands of sites). If aboutus.org outranks you for your domain name, you've got problems and it probably has something to do with links, how you manipulated them, got them, or distributed them.If entire chunks of extremely long tail searches go missing then it's probably because the content is available at 50 other websites, generally this is for your weak travel affiliate type stuff where they just republish hotel descriptions provided by their affiliate provider. I don't consider that a penalty but rather a crap website that deserves to not being seen because it's not bringing anything new to the party, and better ways to sort that information, better graphics, and a cooler template don't constitute anything new.”

So it is recommended that one should always check Google Webmaster Tools for any error messages.

A glance at the issues:

• Basically search under your domain name.
• A sudden drop in traffic, can be a hint and can often lead to other reasons that can be discovered at the later stage, but is surely a bad sign that something may be penalized.
• If aboutus.org outranks you for your domain name, then don't take it lightly!

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups

Click here to subscribe to our RSS feed to get a daily digest of news around search engine industry. PageTraffic SEO Blog is updated four times a day and is ranked as one of the best search engine resources blog by Pandia!