Source: https://www.todhost.com/blog/google-penalty-a-guide-to-know-your-status-and-recover-from-a-penalty.html

One of the worst things that will hit any website is a Google penalty. The frustration of being hit can be so severe for a website that significantly rely of search engine to drive traffic and generate sales. Because Google controls over 6 percent of search engine traffic, a Google penalty ought to be taken seriously and if your website is still clean with Google, you need to do your best to avoid a penalty.

Google has been drastically updating its algorithms for the past few years. These updates were implemented to give users the best possible answers to their search queries and provide the best user experience (UX) possible. The resulting Google Penalties became necessary as Search Engine Optimizers grew more sophisticated at finding ways to leverage things like links and targeted content to boost rankings and organic traffic.

The major updates of Panda and Penguin drastically changed the landscape and actually penalized sites for bending the rules and not completely following Google’s Guidelines. These updates are now engrained in the ever-changing algorithm set, continuing to penalize more and more websites every day. Check Google Penalty Status

There are two ways in which a site can be affected by these updates: a Manual Action or an Algorithmic Penalty.

Google Manual Action Penalty

Manual Action penalties are very easy to distinguish. Google is nice enough to leave you a message in your Webmaster Tools letting you know that a page on your site, or possibly your entire site, has a penalty. These penalties are often accompanied by worse rankings or complete deindexation.

Determining the Update that Caused the Penalty

When you receive a manual action, the note in Webmaster Tools will tell you what is wrong. It may even give you examples of what is wrong. This type of penalty is very difficult to get out of. If you have received one of these messages, you need to work extra hard to upgrade the value of your content and submit a re-consideration request to Google

Algorithmic Penalty

When Google runs an algorithm update, these types of penalties are automatically distributed to websites that flag behaviors that are outside of Google's guidelines. If you are hit by an algorithmic penalty from Google, check to see what major updates occurred recently.

Recent Years Google Algorithm Updates and What They Targeted

Panda (2011)

Panda targeted low quality content. Content farms were hit the hardest, but anyone with low quality, irrelevant, plagiarized, or keyword-stuffed content received hefty penalties as well.

Penguin (2012)

Penguin targeted poor quality links. The goal was to eliminate the sites that were paying for links, using automated link-building software, or obtaining low-quality links.

Hummingbird (2013)

Sites with long-tail search queries were hit the hardest with this algorithmic update. The main goal of the update was to create a more stable searching system for users by understanding human speech, and getting away from random keyword searching. Since many people use their phones, mobile devices, or voice recognition devices for searching, the update made it easier for those users to ask a question, so the content receiving the best rankings became the ones who answered a question, not the ones who had the related keyword in the search.

It can be much harder to figure out what penalty caused an algorithmic penalty. There are over 500 updates a year and picking which one is hampering your traffic is very difficult. Of course, this is much easier if you have access to Google Analytics. If you do not, you can get a really good idea using SEMrush.

Using Google Analytics

If you have access to Google Analytics, there are tools that can help you. Many webmasters use a paid tool called Fruition Google Penalty Checker. You grant the tool access to your Google Analytics account, and it will make a graph of all the penalties, and give you a percentage of the chance that it affected your site.

Another tool that works well (and is free!) is called Barracuda. It works the same way as Fruition does. You grant the tool access to Google Analytics and it produces a pretty graph that highlights the updates. This tool does not give you the likelihood of the update affecting your site like Fruition does, which is the reason Fruition is preferable to the professionals, but cost you some money.

Determining Update without Google Analytics

If you do not have access to Google Analytics or Webmaster Tools, which is often the case, you can still get a good idea of what update caused the traffic drop using a traffic estimator tool like SEMrush. Using this tool, you can see drops in traffic and then correlate the month the traffic dropped to a penalty using MOZ’s Google Algorithm Change History.

Detecting a Google Penalty

Check Indexxing

If you are concerned about a site-wide penalty, there is a quick and easy way to check. Type in site:yourdomain.com into Google, and hit enter. This limits the search to only bring up your domain, and if nothing shows up, you are not in the searches. If your site was already indexed into the Google search pages, and now is missing in action, a site-wide penalty, or a blacklisting is the only possible cause. If your site is brand new, keep in mind that it takes anywhere from a day to a week to be indexed, so do not panic if your new site has not shown up yet.

Check Google Webmaster Console

Log into your Google webmaster tools and check for notifications. You can check for manual review penalties by clicking “Search Traffic>Manual Actions” on the side bar.

Check KeyWords

If you have noticed a drop in your website traffic, but it shows up when entering hyper-specific queries in Google, you may be suffering from a partial penalty.

Type in site:yourdomain.com mainKeyword into Google, and hot enter. Swap out the “mainKeyword” for whatever search terms you would use to find your site. If one or more of your pages does not show up, you may be suffering from a partial penalty. Try searching your brand name, if you are not on page for your brand, then there is a serious problem.

Check PageRank

Go to PRchecker.info, enter your domain name in the search bar, and hit enter. You will have a page rank displayed that you can use to compare to past rankings. If your ranking is lower than it has been, you may have a penalty to contend with. Keep in mind that Pagerank is rarely updated, so recent any recent penalties may not show a decrease in page rank right away.

Check Your Visitors

Google analytics is a great place to view your traffic, and get an idea of when traffic started to drop. Check back several months if you have to, but find out when the decrease occurred, or started occurring so you can begin working on the possible problems.

Escaping the Google Penalty

While getting out of an algorithmic penalty is much easier than a manual penalty. By determining what update affected your site, you can find the cause, then correct it. Most of these penalties are data based, so if you can get your site below the threshold set by the search engine, you should be able to rank well again.