How to Detect Google Penalties

A site of mine suddenly suffered a major drop in traffic over the course of a few days, a few weeks before the Google algo updates May Day and Caffeine. The site's now still in the index and gets a couple of Google hits every day, while it used to get 250 hits a day before.

I suppose it's got to do with those updates, but how can I be sure it's not a penalty of some sort? Is there a kind of checklist I can run to know whether the site suffered a penalty or not?

Thanks, Chris

 

You can use Google webmaster tools to see if there are any indexing errors or a sudden decrease in incoming links. Other than that, try using tools to detect duplicate content issues.
What place do you appear in search engine results? what kind of change did you see? what about other SEs? Same thing as in google?

 

A quick search could have solved this problem for you: http://www.labnol.org/internet/search/website-penalized-or-banned-in-google/3848/

 

It may be that you may have built lots of links from one site say any forum..... and the forum deleted your profile you lost all the incoming links from that forum as a result your backlinks lost.

 

It might be... But not likely.

The more likely scenario is that it WAS the updates. Google didn't flip the switch overnight. They've been rolling out Caffiene for the last 8 or so months... It was on one of their data centers for months... then 2... but as the cutover day approached they rolled it out to more and more data centers, faster and faster. So you would have noticed a difference weeks before the last data center was converted.

 

That is really a great article that you shared over here. I was bit concern regarding my site of getting penalized. The SERP of my keyword is not on top position. I was bit scare regarding my site getting penalized. But the article has provided a good knowledge and clear my doubts.

 

This is really very good info. specially for me.

 

Check Your site in Sandbox tool..

 

Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) and Google Analytics (GA) can really help you assessing the behavior of your site.