I have seen many peoples paranoid about their site penalty just because of some fluctuation. I think these simples tips could help you define if your site has been penalized or not. Of course these ones are not for site that still a new one (3 months and lower). 1. Do search your site first with your own domain name without extension. If your domain is unique then your domain "must" ranked #1. If not, your site might has some sort of penalization. Otherwise check if your site ranked below aboutus.org. If so, you have some serious problem and need attention. Also do search your domain with extension either. you must ranked #1 for whatever case. If not, a critical problem has been occured. Exception - If you have other similar name then you might not be ranked #1 but your competitor does. This is common because your competitor has more authoritative status in Google point of view compared to your site. It's time to built up more quality links and contents. 2. Do search with site operator (site:domain.com) and see if your homepage ranked #1 or not. If not and inner page ranked instead, your site may be either new or the homepage has been re-evaluate by Google. This might be a sign for penalty either. 3. Do search with info operator (info:domain.com). This could help you check the site acknowledge by Google. If not, most of the time your site has been de-indexed or penalized already. Hope this help
use the site: info: and cache: operators to check if your site still exists in Google, it may have been already penalized and deleted by the Google gods.
If you see your indexed pages are decreasing in site:domain operator, then its surely penalized. But, again, there are several penalties and the symptoms are different for them.
I would also recommend you check your site with Google Webmaster tools. Sometimes one of your pages will have a outgoing link to a page that no longer exists and Google will penalize your page. There could also be a bug with the a page's scripts, so you should always check it.
Thanks for wrapping this question up, it's good for reference purposes - every now and then threads keep appearing with the eternal "do you think my site has been penalized?".
Yeah if person website is not there in search results(using these methods) then surely google don't like the website.
I check my blog using your tips, result is Ok (no penalty). But my traffic from google reduced (500 to 20 per day), why? My popular keywords de listed my pages on search result, articles are indexed on google. Please help me...