Has your organic search traffic plummeted? Worried that Google might have hit your site with a manual or algorithmic penalty?
Most SEO agencies will charge you an arm and a leg for the answer.
Good news. I’m going to show you how to determine if you’re site has been penalized, identify which penalty you’re site has been hit by, and formulate the appropriate recovery plan.
The best part, I’m going to show you how to do it all for free, and quickly.
Unfortunately, in the event of a Google penalty many webmasters panic and start ‘fixing’ things that aren’t actually broken, often making things worse. In order to form a recovery plan, it is important to first diagnose the source of the penalty.
The first step is to determine whether the traffic dropped as a result of a manual penalty, or an algorithm update.
Manual Penalties
Manual penalties happen when Google’s spam algorithm is flagged by something on your site, and Google decides to apply a manual penalty to your site’s rankings. Manual penalties are usually accompanied by a message within your Google Webmaster account. As a result, manual penalties are easier to identify.
Algorithm Updates
Penalties occur as Google naturally updates its algorithm. A small change, or group of changes in Google’s algorithm can cause your site’s traffic to drop. Penalties associated with algorithm updates are often much harder to detect because they don’t come with a notification in Webmaster Tools.
Penguin or Panda?
Whether it’s a manual penalty or algorithm update that has burned your rankings, the source of the penalty is likely Penguin or Panda.
The Penguin algorithm targets site’s with unnatural back link profiles and over-optimized anchor text.
The Panda algorithm targets low quality duplicate content that hinders user experience.
Where to Start
The first thing you should do is log into you Webmaster Tools account, and check to see if you have received any manual actions against your website. Click on “search traffic” and then “manual actions”.
As mentioned above, both manual and algorithmic penalties are usually the result of low quality content or manipulative link building strategies.
The next step is check if your site’s drop in rankings/ traffic correlates with any recent algorithm updates.
Moz Change History
SEOMoz has a very helpful resource page that lists out all of the major algorithm updates, the date they happened, along with detailed information about the update.
If you are seeing movement in the SERPs but there is no indication of an update on the change history page, take a look at the day’s MozCast.
MozCast shows turbulence in rankings similar to a weather report. The hotter and stormier the forecast, the greater the rankings fluctuation that day.
Chartelligence
Chartelligence is a Google Chrome extension that allows you to overlay data onto graphs in Google Analytics and Quantcast. It is great for mapping traffic/ranking drops against algorithm updates.
This extension also allows you to overlay information such as public holidays, economic activities, SEO updates and a variety of other dates for the year.
Source: Robbierichards
