Recently, Google rolled out new algorithm changes to search which would curb out unoriginal content and low quality content from the search engine and degrade their rankings.
As such, many users are reporting huge traffic drops for their websites. But are these traffic drops temporary or has Google really penalized your website? What is the best way to find it out? Well, here are some answers to find out whether your website has been penalized by Google or not and how to find it out.
Check Analytics for Statistics
If you use a analytics software like Google Analytics, you should check your stats for the past few days. If your traffic has dropped from what it was since last couple of days and has remained consistent, your website might have been penalized.
However, there could be various other reasons sudden traffic drops so make sure to analyze whether you still rank higher for your best keywords and haven’t lost traffic on them.
Also make sure to check that you are still getting traffic for those keywords for past few days or not. Another thing worth checking is to see whether you have lost traffic from referring sites like Facebook and Twitter too.
A thorough check of these things should give you a clear idea on whether or not you have been penalized by Google.
Check Google Webmaster Dashboard
Google Webmasters Tools provides a good idea about what traffic is coming to your site and which searches are driving traffic to you. Make sure to analyze the data there to see if there have been any sudden drops on your popular keywords.
Google Webmasters provides users with a good way to track search queries through charts so make sure to use those tools to determine whether you have lost traffic or not.
Use Site Search Feature in Google
Google provides users with a good way to search results from a particular site in their index. The site operator should be used to verify whether your content is being indexed by Google or not.
To use site search, head over to Google and search for site:techie-buzz.com (replace the site URL with your own blog URL). If you see a drop in indexed content it would mean that your site is being penalized. You can also use the “search tools” available in the left hand side menu to see whether the recent content from your site has been indexed or not.
Don’t base your judgment on posts which have been written a few hours ago as Google crawling can be slow sometimes, instead check if your past days content has been indexed or not.
Summarizing
Though it is very difficult to find out whether your site has been penalized by Google or not, these things will help you at-least get close to finding that out. Things should be ok if you haven’t seen a traffic drop yet, but you have to also continue writing quality content so that the site is not penalized in future.
Have you seen a traffic drop recently? Did you use any other way to find out if you are penalized or not? Do let me know through your comments.
(Image Credit: odlee.blogspot.com)
