Google Penalty Checker

Google penalty checker seems to be quite popular these days, especially with all the domains that are getting banned these days by Google. There are more and more people searching Google for a penalty checker every day, either because their domain has been banned, because they have bought a new (or old) domain and they are afraid that it is banned, or maybe because they are about to purchase an aged domain.

No matter the reason, the fact is that the Google penalty checker is something that should not be lightly dismissed. Due diligence before buying a domain is not only common sense but also advised.

When you search the web for a good penalty checker, you will notice that there are tons out there, literally. But how do you know which one is right and which one can you easily discard? Of course checking for a Google penalty is only half the won batter. The next 50% is to actually do something about it to remove the penalty should you be unlucky to have one.

I have tested a few online penalty checker software or services with a domain that I knew for sure that it was banned, and to be honest, I was not very pleased with the results. I also checked it with a regular domain (one of my websites) and several such services told me that my domain was banned or under 'server penalty'. Whereas I was on the first page of Google for some of my keywords. So what gives?

The reason for this is because there is actually no easy and clear way to find out penalty (if any) you have for your own site. Google is very tight lipped about it all and since nobody really knows their algorithm for ranking and penalizing sites, all these online penalty checking tools are just guessing at best.

Maybe one of the better ones that I found to work in most cases is the penalty checker by Seomoves. Through the testing that I did so far, they seemed to give me the most accurate results. But even they were not entirely on the mark.

This is when you really have to roll up your sleeves and dig deep in. It's time to work. There are some ways that can lead you to quite an accurate estimation whether you have been banned by Google or not, however here comes a disclaimer:

If anyone tells you that they can tell you for sure, they are lying, plain and simple. And if any tool actually wants to take your money for helping you guess, run the other way as fast as you can.

So here are a few things you can do if you want to check the domain for any Google penalties.

• Check the domain name in the Google search box without the actual TLD. so if your domain is perfectsearchmastering.com (made-up domain), then search in google "perfectsearchmastering", "perfect search mastering" and perfect search mastering (without the quotes). If all these queries give back your domain on the first page of google, you are ok. If not, you might be banned. To be sure, you can also check for site:yourdomainname.com to see how many pages the site has currently indexed in Google.
• If you already have the domain and you have the Google Webmaster associated with your site, then log on and check to see for any messages from Google. Sometimes when they penalize your sites, they send out a message warning you of it. Or even if there is no message, you will see your traffic stats as no traffic at all for any keywords whatsoever.
• Sometimes sites can be hacked without the knowledge of the webmaster. Luckily you can check for any malware installed on your site through the Webmaster tools as well. You can also check in Google for http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=domain.com (where the domain is yours). This basically shows whether your site is blacklisted by Google due to unsafe browsing.
• If you want to buy an aged domain and you are not sure whether it has a previous penalty before purchasing it, enter the website address in the Wayback machine (archive.org). If the domain is old enough, it will show an archive of how the site looked like previously. You can then see the type of content it had. Sometimes even very legit sounding domain names had a lot of bad content, low quality content or even for mature audience, so you can be sure that you stumbled onto something nasty there. Avoid this type of domain at all costs. Of course if you do decide to buy it, you can always as Google for a reinclusion request since you are now a new owner. You might get the domain out of ban...or not. Do you want to take the risk?

When the Google penalty checker (automated or manual) gives you the info that your site is indeed banned or penalized by Google, you need to think of what you did wrong and what should you avoid the next time.

So here is a short list of common problems that can lead to a Google penalty.

• Duplicate content issues. This is quite big with Google especially recently. If you are copying information from another site, Google can easily find who was the initial poster and will place you lower in the SERPS (search engine results) accordingly. This is not really a penalty, it is simply offering the visitors a good user experience, but of course, it might seem to you like a penalty, especially when you will end up earning less in the process.
• If your site is linking to various banned sites or bad neighborhoods. Check all your outgoing links and see where they actually go. Sometimes, especially if you have a blog, the comments section is really at fault. Many people don't really moderate where the comments to their sites are comming from and they never know where they are unsuspectingly linking to.
• Over optimization can easily trigger various Google filters. Many so-called experts at SEO advise you (and do it themselves) to really optimize all pages of your site with keywords in the meta tags and in the content. Same with keyword stuffing. Also backlinking with the same anchor text over and over again can trigger such a filter. Afterall if real people are backlinking to you because they like your site, do you think that they will ALL backlink to you using the very same keywords? Highly unlikely.
  

You can easily check for such practices (even if your domain is not banned) by using backlinkwatch.com. This will not only show your anchor text used in each backlink to your site but also which link is dofollow and which is nofollow.

There are many other considerations when it comes to Google penalty checker and finding out whether your site has been penalized, and if - then why, but the best place to really start is by going to your own Google Webmaster Tools and start digging around. If you have a problem, Google will most probably communicate it with you in one way or another.