Hey guys, so I'm still stuck with wondering if my website is actually penalized or not. This is a follow up from https://forums.digitalpoint.com/threads/got-penalised-for-not-updating-for-1-month.2723852/ A lot of my keywords are still ranking but they are all in the deeper end of the search pages when they used to be all on the first page. Also, I searched my site's META description but my website didn't show up. Instead my Facebook page, social bookmarking sites, etc. that has my description showed up. Can someone tell me if this is a penalty or not? How long will it last? What should I do?
Not seeing your description come up first in Google search is pretty big indicator that you're penalized. It's not the bottom line though. If my description is "Great products from Amazon", you can guarantee that I won't come up on the 100th page. Try instead searching for your domain name "www.blah.com" in the Google search bar. If you don't come up for that, you're definitely penalized. If it comes to that point, you're going to have to diagnose if its an onsite or offsite problem and take corrective actions to repair the over-optimization you've done. Let me know if you need help with that.
Google says "Google's generation of page titles and descriptions (or "snippets") is completely automated and takes into account both the content of a page as well as references to it that appear on the web. We use a number of different sources for this information, including descriptive information in the title and meta tags for each page. We may also use publicly available information—for instance...." Source: support(dot)google.com/webmasters/answer/35624?hl=en So description is not coming in search engine is not indicator of penalty. You should check it by url/domain name. The time to remove penalty varies according penalty types.
It depends on the description then. If it's something short (and if this phrase was used by other people while they are doing SEO), then probably it's normal. Did you use "" while searching? Also, while the query site:yourdomain.com returns results, then everything is OK.