When you perform your SEO flawlessly and with commitment, you can receive some absolutely fantastic results from Google, the world’s largest search engine. There’s no better platform for getting your business, products or services out to as large a group of the public as you can with Google.

However, you have to play by the right rules or you can be penalized. If you’re unsure about whether or not you have been penalized by Google, then ask yourself the following questions to help find some answers.

1. Is your website new? If you have a new website, don’t be surprised and don’t panic if your site isn’t being found within Google.

This common phenomenon is known as “The Google Sandbox“, and whether or not it’s a real thing, it’s certainly very widespread for new websites to take some time before they get found, indexed and then highly ranked.

Additionally, rapidly jumping up and down between vastly different ranking spots is also common for newer, less established websites that have not really found their place yet.

2. How long have you noticed changes? If you have been looking at your positioning to gauge how you’re doing in Google, it’s important not to overreact to changes that aren’t longstanding.

Even older and more prominent websites can fluctuate greatly within the results of Google for certain terms, or all of their targeted search terms.

If you check up on your site one day and you aren’t where you thought you would be, give it a few more days or a week to see if it jumps back.

3. Are you noticing real changes in your numbers? Besides just checking in on your rankings, it’s hugely important that you actually check your stats, whether you use Google Analytics or any other services.

You might think you’ve dropped down by a huge margin, but then check your traffic from Google searches and see that it has been pretty consistent.

Maybe only one or two pages or keywords have changed greatly, or maybe the results on your own Google have been skewed to your other recent searches. The stats don’t lie though, so dive in and take a peek at your numbers to see if there have been real and prominent changes.

4. Do you see any warnings from Google Webmaster’s Tools? The webmasters tools area of Google is an invaluable resource, because they will tell you upfront and blatantly some of the issues that they are having with your website.

Maybe there is a lot of duplicated META information, missing or broken links, incorrect sitemap forms or data or anything else.

If you see warnings there, they could be factoring in on your rankings, and ignored warnings could lead to your rankings being penalized or devalued (that is if the warnings are substantial and not smaller or subjective issues).

Therefore you don’t want to jump to any conclusions before you see what those tools are telling you. Plus, when you correct any significant warnings or issues, you will be restored.

5. Have you done anything you thought you shouldn’t have? Many people try to get around the system and make use of some black hat, illicit or highly questionable promotional or optimization strategies.

If you’ve done this and were hoping it wouldn’t catch up to you, maybe it has.

If you think you’ve been participating in something that has negatively affected your rankings, try to break off your connections to that and start fresh, and you should be able to rebuild up your credentials.

6. How are you doing in the other search engines? You’re never going to be ranked exactly the same across all of the major search engines.

However, it’s usually a safe bet that if you’re doing pretty well in Google, you’ll be doing pretty well in Bing or Yahoo, and vice versa.

So if you’re Google traffic and rankings have nosedived, then you have to evaluate your traffic and rankings on the other major services.

If they all have nosedived, you have to re-up your efforts in terms of keyword research, optimization, link building, fresh content and more. If Google is the only one that has significantly dropped off, it’s a strong sign that yes, you have been penalized within their rankings.

Related posts:

1. Does “Nofollow” Attribute Work? Google Says Yes, Studies Say Otherwise
2. Does SEO really make any difference for my website?
3. How Does Bounce Rate Affect SEO Results for a Website and How to Lower the Bounce Rate?
4. The Wrong Way to do SEO
5. Social Media Traffic & Your Website

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