From time to time, it is important to know if your website has been penalized by Google. If a site is penalized, it will rank poorly on search engines. This has many implications on the site.

The Google ranking algorithm comes with different names and descriptions – panda, pigeon, penguin, and the hummingbird. The descriptions are determined by the kind of change that Google makes to the ranking algorithm.

Sites are constantly influenced by these changes. This means that their rankings will go down or be completely lost. No webmaster will like to be found wanting by Google because it will translate into a heavy loss of website traffic and a decline in their earnings.

When a website ranks high on Google, there are immense benefits to be derived. So it is better to remain in Google’s good books.

Getting Served a Google Penalty

There are two types of penalty that Google metes to erring webmasters. You may be served:

A manual penalty – This is a penalty that is imposed by one of Google’s Quality team members. Such a penalty may be administered to the whole of your site or to just some pages on your site.

When this happens, Google will easily let you know what the problem was and steps that you can take to correct it. You will need to get to work and put the corrections in place. When you are through, you can submit a reconsideration request and they will let you know if the penalty has been lifted.

Algorithmic penalty: This is the type of penalty that’s placed on your site by Google algorithm. This happens when Google bot crawls your site and finds every reason for which you should be penalized.

It doesn’t leave you information to let you know what the penalty is all about, so you need to check up the problems and adjust as much as necessary. Log in to your Google Analytics and check the organic traffic to your site.

If there has been a drop in traffic beginning from the dates Google released an algorithmic change, then it is possible that you have been affected by it and it will possibly be the reason for the drop in traffic.