How to know if you have a Google penalty
The first sign of a possible Google penalty is a sudden decline in your rankings. If your organic traffic unexpectedly decreases by a lot across multiple keywords, a penalty might be the reason.
You should first ensure there were no technical issues, like hacking, indexing issues, or site migrations that happened around the same time.
Use Google Search Console and Analytics to see when these drops happened, and check your account for any manual penalty messages from Google.
Remember — penalty drops usually affect entire domains and aren’t isolated to just a few pages. You might see rankings go down for unrelated keywords across your site.
If competitor sites that were previously ranking lower than yours have now jumped ahead, it could also suggest they were unaffected by the issues your site was penalised for.
With the above checks done and an algorithmic penalty suspected, you’ll need to seek advice from an SEO penalty removal company — like SALT.
Our experts can confirm if your site was hit with a Google update or penalty and guide you through how to get those rankings back.
More importantly, we can help improve and safeguard your site to ensure fewer penalties happen in the future