How to tell if your website was hit by a Google penalty

Sometimes, right after a Google update, search traffic drops. Understandably, the first thought is that your site may have been penalized. But in many cases, there's no actual penalty. The algorithm changes, competitors adapt faster, and your rankings drop as a result. That’s not a punishment - it’s the natural outcome of a reshuffle.

One of the key indicators here is the shape of the decline. If you look at your Search Console performance report and the drop is gradual, without a sudden plunge on a specific date, you’re likely dealing with ranking loss rather than a manual or algorithmic penalty. Still frustrating - but not the same issue.

So how can you tell if there’s a Google penalty on your website? And if there is one, what kind is it?

The very first step is to check the “Manual Actions” section in Google Search Console. If Google’s human reviewers flagged your site for violations, the message will show up there. That’s the most reliable way to detect a manual penalty.

The downside? This only works for manual actions - when a site was reviewed and found to be in direct breach of Google's policies. If your site was hit by an algorithmic penalty (applied automatically without human review), there will be no message. Not in the Console, and not in your email.

But even algorithmic filters leave a trail - if you know what to look for.
Here are a few ways to narrow it down:

Match the date of the drop with known Google updates
Sites affected by algorithm updates can start losing traffic as early as day two of the rollout, somewhere in the middle, or even on the last day. In some cases, the decline happens shortly after the update is officially completed. If there's timing alignment, it's a useful signal - but not definitive proof.

Compare branded vs. non-branded queries
If branded traffic (queries including your brand name) remains stable while non-branded traffic drops, it's a strong signal that your content lost visibility, not your brand. This points more toward algorithmic re-evaluation than a penalty.

Check how top keywords performed
A sharp drop in rankings for important keywords, especially ones that were in the top 3 or top 10, may point to algorithmic adjustments affecting your site. A broader shift across multiple queries is also worth noting.

Analyze behavior metrics
Sometimes penalties coincide with clear drops in session duration, increased bounce rates, or fewer pageviews per visit. While these don’t prove a penalty, they show that Google’s perception of your content’s relevance may have changed. For a more detailed breakdown with structured examples, see the following: How to Identify a Google Penalty on Your Website Yourself

It’s a helpful reference if you're reviewing a traffic drop and want to check your assumptions.
There are more angles to consider - backlink profile shifts, page-level issues, technical SEO gaps - but the methods above help to determine whether you're dealing with a penalty or something else entirely.

 

Great guide. My website’s traffic dropped significantly after March 7, 2024. The site has high-quality content written by my team of copywriters — no AI was used. There are no manual action warnings in Search Console but at the same time, traffic from Google keeps declining month after month((
I reached out to a local UK agency, and they performed an SEO audit. We implemented many of their recommendations, but it’s been over six months now and there’s still no improvement. Could you help me understand what might be going on with my site? Have you seen similar cases before?

 

After an update, for most of my sites, traffic typically spikes sharply, then drops below pre-update levels before stabilizing, often settling slightly higher than before.

 

Based on the timing of your traffic drop, it looks like your website was affected by the March 2024 Spam Update and the March 2024 Core Update - both of which started rolling out on March 5. Most sites that saw declines following the Spam Update were hit with an algorithmic filter for spam content.

That’s a much broader concept than many people realize. I recommend reviewing Google’s documentation on Spam policies for Google web search. Pay special attention to the section on "Scaled content abuse" \ - in my experience, this has often been the reason behind penalties triggered by the March 2024 Spam Update.

 

Thank you for the clarification.
In the Scaled content abuse section, it says: "Using generative AI tools or other similar tools to generate many pages without adding value for users".
But that's the thing - we’re publishing unique content, written by our writers without using any AI tools, as I mentioned earlier.
This clearly shouldn’t be the reason why our website would have been penalized.

 

There are a lot of nuances here, and it’s hard to make any definite conclusions without seeing the actual website. But I'll try.

First, just because your copywriters claim they’re not using AI to create content doesn’t necessarily mean that’s the case. In reality, it's quite common for writers to use AI tools without disclosing it - and while you might not be able to detect it, Google's AI classifiers probably can

Second, the issue isn’t AI itself - Google hasn’t banned the use of AI-generated content. The problem is weak content that offers little real value. And in most cases, it’s templated content created with AI (based on my personal experience).

Third, the drop in traffic might not even be related to content at all. A proper analysis of the website would be needed before making any definite conclusions.

 

Traffic drops can be of many reasons.
Have you checked your keywords still ranking on 1st page of Google?
Are your ranking keywords brings you the impressions?
If you are getting impressions and your keywords are still ranking higher or on the 1st page then the issue may be
Zero search results
AI generated results
You are not providing the straight answer to the user query
Your content structure ain't aligned properly
Missing heading tags etc.

I didn't give a technical answer, it is just the general answer to your question and have nothing with the penalties, just a basic audit you can do.

Ask your technical SEO team to do the thorough analysis of the website and check you are following the guidelines, your content is for users, following EEAT, and user intent.

 

Really helpful breakdown, thank you! I’ve definitely mixed up ranking drops with actual penalties before, so that distinction between gradual and sudden declines makes a lot of sense. I hadn’t thought about looking at branded vs. non-branded queries either. That’s a great tip. I’m going to poke around in Search Console and check for any Manual Actions. Appreciate how clearly you laid everything out!

 

No, our keywords have started ranking worse. Both impressions and clicks have dropped.
Overall traffic has decreased significantly and continues to decline slowly.
Our blog pages provide thorough answers to users' questions.

On Bing, for example, our traffic keeps growing, but with Google it's the opposite.
It's frustrating because we've put a lot of effort into running our website properly, and the last thing I expected was such a drop in traffic.

 

It seems like it's due to March 2024 Helpful Content Update.
This update mainly devalued content like

• Slightly repetitive or similar to other content
• Content that already covered by plenty of users before you
• More focus on SEO not on user intent

Fixes you can try

• Reevaluate your content intent
• Use Google's NLP cues: People Also ask and SERP features

If your site has grown and diversified, internal linking and topical clustering might be diluted.
Fixes you can try

• Internal Linking: Link blog posts deeply and naturally
• Build topic cluster
• Check your important pages are indexed or not. You can check by using site:yourdomain.com [keyword]

Crawl Priority and Renderability can also affect visibility

• Use Google Search Console’s “Crawl Stats” and "Coverage Reports".
• Test key pages in “URL Inspection” tool for any rendering issues.

Check for Cannibalization issue: Sometimes your own content competing with itself if you have similar pages and having same titles for blog posts and product pages.

 

Interesting topic! I've encountered traffic drops after Google updates multiple times. It's very important not to panic when this happens, because as you mentioned, it could simply be the result of algorithm changes, not a penalty. I usually check if there are any noticeable changes in the rankings of key queries and whether any new Google updates were released during that period.

 

1. Check Google Search Console for Manual Penalties
Google Search Console (GSC) is one of the first places to check if you suspect a penalty.
Steps:

• Log in to Google Search Console: If you don't have it set up yet, this is an essential step to help you monitor your website’s performance.
• Go to the "Manual Actions" Report:
  • In the GSC dashboard, navigate to Security & Manual Actions > Manual Actions.
  • If your website has been hit with a manual penalty, it will appear here with a detailed explanation from Google.
  • Common reasons for manual penalties include unnatural links, thin or low-quality content, or violations of Google's webmaster guidelines.

What to look for:

• If there’s a message under Manual Actions, it will detail the specific reason for the penalty (e.g., “Unnatural Links to Your Site” or “Spammy Structured Data”).
• Once you resolve the issue, you can submit a reconsideration request through GSC to ask Google to review the penalty.

2. Check for Significant Traffic Drops in Google Analytics
One of the telltale signs of a Google penalty is a sharp drop in traffic.
Steps:

• Log in to Google Analytics and go to the Acquisition > Overview report.
• Look for significant drops in traffic, especially if the drop coincides with known Google algorithm updates (such as Panda, Penguin, or Core updates).
• Compare traffic periods: You can compare data between different periods, such as year-over-year or month-over-month, to identify drastic drops or changes.

What to look for:

• A sudden and sharp decline in traffic, particularly around a Google algorithm update, can indicate that your site may have been penalized.
• If the drop is consistent across multiple pages or keywords, it suggests a broader penalty, not a single issue.

 

Just because your traffic drops in Google doesn’t mean it has to drop in Bing, Yahoo, or other search engines. They all use different ranking algorithms, and honestly, I think Google is still far more advanced and complex. That said, Google’s updates over the past year have definitely made things more challenging to navigate.

Send me your site URL in PM or through the link in my signature - I’ll check it out and see if I can help.

 

^^^This is the big one and is becoming more so.

 

Rephrased with AI, not originally generated with AI. I used Deepseek for rephrasing and restructuring.

 

Hi There
to be absaloutely certain Check for sudden traffic drops, deindexed pages, or warnings in Google Search Console.

 

Don’t pay anything or hire an “SEO specialist”—there’s nothing they can do.
Google has forgotten what a “searcher” is and turned itself into an exclusive club.
The big players are the ones Google cares about.
The rest are sent on impossible quests, and just when you complete them, they change the algorithm, forcing you to adapt again.
It doesn’t matter what or how you write - they’re not interested in you.
Google only cares about those who pay them for AdWords.
I remember how it all started: a good search engine was supposed to find the right content.
If it couldn’t, it was considered a bad search engine.

 

- That’s not true. We’ve helped dozens of websites hit by Google penalties and have successful recovery cases to show for it. If you know exactly what needs to be fixed and are willing to do the work, there is a real chance to recover from both algorithmic and manual penalties. How high those chances are depends entirely on the specific website and its situation.

I’m not saying this to promote my services, but to make one thing clear - a Google penalty is not a death sentence. Of course, if your site has thousands or even tens of thousands of low-quality, AI-generated articles, then yes - you’ll need to put in serious effort to clean it up. Without that, the penalty won’t go away.

In many cases, webmasters have only themselves to blame. They thought they could endlessly churn out thousands of thin, useless pages or buy piles of low-quality backlinks and get away with it. Well, not anymore. Google won’t reward those sites with traffic. It won’t even index them. And to some extent - that’s fair.

 

What penalties?
In 99% of cases, there’s no penalty at all.
The real issue is Google’s monopoly.
They’ve forgotten they’re a search engine, not some VIP club for the privileged.
A search engine’s job is to find content, not judge it or decide what users should or shouldn't see.
Penalties aren’t the problem.
You don’t need some fancy SEO expert — you just need to identify the cause and fix it.
In 99% of cases, traffic drops because of deindexing, simply because Google decided so.
I’ve had websites almost completely disappear from the index for no reason — then months later, they suddenly come back and traffic returns.
And I did nothing to cause or fix it.
I also have sites I constantly update, but their organic traffic never grows past a certain point.
That’s not normal.
Even when I add more and more posts, traffic stays the same.
Google was originally meant to find and index websites.
On my site, there are always 5–10 posts that aren't indexed.
But if I manually submit them in GSC, they get indexed in 5 minutes.
Meanwhile, another post gets randomly deindexed.
So there are always 5–10 unindexed posts.
Even ones that were getting traffic can get deindexed.
This isn't my mistake — it’s just how buggy and unreliable Google is.
And how exactly are so-called "SEO experts" supposed to help?
Instead of simply indexing posts, Google sends bloggers to complete quests.
So bloggers end up running in circles — buying backlinks and writing useless keyword-stuffed posts with no real value.
All these "experts" do is go down a must-do checklist: robots.txt, meta tags, etc.
Any blogger can do that.
There is no real help from SEO "experts".

 

You’ve written such a mess of a comment that there’s no point in addressing each sentence with a detailed rebuttal.

I’ll just say this - you really shouldn’t project your entirely subjective experience onto all websites.
Have you dealt with a few dozen sites hit by a wide range of penalties - manual and algorithmic, after core updates, spam updates, or the Helpful Content Update?
Have you thoroughly audited them to back up what you’re claiming? I’m pretty sure you haven’t.

I have. And what I’ve seen is nothing like what you’re describing here.