Dumb Question Time : Google Penalties

[craigmn3]

Where do I find if my site has any google penalties?

I have not been informed of any, nothing on web master tools...?

Is there a place to go to find out if I have penalties?

[mjtaylor]

Is your URL still in the index?

When was the last time you looked at your rank?

How far have you dropped? For all keywords, for your most competitive? What else can you tell us about the pattern?

You may or may not expect a message in WT re: any issues.

[craigmn3]

We dropped, but we can tie that to Panda first (page 1 -2) then Penquin (page 2-3)

I did have a large quantity of low quality IBLs that were disqualified (went from 350K - 150K) - so I know what my problem is

But I have been reading where people have been receiving -30, -50 penalties.....and I was wondering specifically if there is a place they post those

[deepsand]

But I have been reading where people have been receiving -30, -50 penalties ...

It's been yearssince I've heard anyone mention those conjectured entities.

...and I was wondering specifically if there is a place they post those

I suspect that you'll find such are in the same realm as the mythical forward and reverse sandboxes.

[mjtaylor]

I think those conjectured penalties were verified, actually, but memory can be a tricky thing. In any case, those were manual penalties and in such a case, you wanted to clean up your act and file a reinclusion request.

Craig, if you were hit by the Big Ps, it's not a penalty, its an algorithmic hit. . My advice would be to do the best you can do to get the lower quality links removed, clean up any other quality issues your site may have and move forward with link building. You might, perhaps, file a report with Google that suggests you feel you were unfairly affected: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/...THZkaTBQbkE6MQ.

Wishing you an easy clean up of the Poop left by Ps.

[deepsand]

I think those conjectured penalties were verified, actually, but memory can be a tricky thing. In any case, those were manual penalties and in such a case, you wanted to clean up your act and file a reinclusion request.

.
I too, am working strictly from memory, which may or may not be complete.

I do, though, distinctly recall that there were those who claimed to be able determine if such alleged penalties had been levied against a site which had not been banned.

[stiller88]

I think the best way to find out if you are penalized or not is by checking out how your keywords perform. If you are not where you used to be , for sure you got a penalty. If you went back 2-3 or more pages, then you have a problem with google. If you just go up or down 2-3 positions , then it's nothing wrong with your website

[SteveGerencser]

If you are not where you used to be , for sure you got a penalty.

What if your competitor is simply better at SEO and you drop several places? What if someone that gave you a site wide link takes it down? What if you screw up your navigation on your site and don't notice? I can come up with dozens of reasons why your site would drop plenty of spots and not one of them is a penalty.

[stiller88]

Yes Steve I agree with you , but if you go from 1st page to 50 , i think that's a penalty, don't you think ?

[SteveGerencser]

Nope, could just be an algo tweak that removed the value from a specific ranking factor that you were relying on.

There are incredibly few actual "penalties". The vast majority of rank changes are algo based tweaks that happen to affect some sites more than others.