Know When Your Website Gets Banned or Penalized in Google
This is a quick tip to help you monitor the health of your website on Google using email and RSS feeds.
You will automatically get to know whether your site has been penalized in rankings or completely banned in Google.
To clarify, ‘penalized’ means that the site exists in Google but ranks considerably lower while ‘ban’ refers to a situation where the site get removed from Google and doesn’t appear in search pages anymore.
Case A: Website is Removed from Google
The site: operator shows a list of pages from your website that exist in Google’s index. If that count is dropping, you may want to investigate.
To automatically monitor the count of your pages inside Google’s index, subscribe to the following RSS feed - Just replace abc.com with your own URL.
Case B: Website Gets Penalized in Google
We can easily track penalties by setting up a custom report inside Google Analytics.
From Google Analytics, go to Traffic Sources -> Search Engines. Now click ‘google’ in the reports section on the right.
The next page will show traffic to your blog that originates just from Google. Rather than checking this report manually each day, we can setup an alert through Email -> Schedule -> Daily, sent each morning.
The PDF report includes a graph for previous days so you can quickly discover any change in traffic patterns.
What’s next: Once you figure out that the site has been banned or penalized in Google, it’s time to write a reconsideration request.
Amit Agarwal
Google Developer Expert, Google Cloud Champion
Amit Agarwal is a Google Developer Expert in Google Workspace and Google Apps Script. He holds an engineering degree in Computer Science (I.I.T.) and is the first professional blogger in India.
Amit has developed several popular Google add-ons including Mail Merge for Gmail and Document Studio. Read more on Lifehacker and YourStory
