Would You Know If You Had a Google Penalty?

Traffic falls off a cliff and somebody immediately says penalty. Nine times out of ten it is not, and the ten minutes spent checking saves you from paying to fix the wrong thing.

The one-minute check

Open Search Console, go to Manual actions in the left menu, and read it.

If it says no issues detected, you do not have a manual action. That is the whole check, and it covers the only kind of penalty Google actually tells you about.

If there is a notice, it will say what the problem is: unnatural links, thin content, spam, a cloaking issue. Google's documentation on manual actions explains each type and what fixing it involves.

Manual actions are rare for ordinary trade businesses. They happen to sites that bought links in bulk, generated hundreds of doorway pages, or did something with the business name that crossed a line.

While you are in there, check Security issues too. A hacked site produces exactly the symptoms people assume are a penalty, and it is far more common for a small business site than any manual action is.

What it usually is instead

A core update. Google changes how it assesses everything, several times a year. Nobody gets a message. Sites move, some down, some up. If your drop lines up with a date a lot of other people were complaining about, that is probably it.

A competitor improving. Less dramatic and very common. Somebody built the service pages they were missing, or finally filled in their profile. You did not fall; they rose, and there are only three spots in the map.

A technical fault. Pages dropping out of the index, a robots.txt change, a rebuild that lost its redirects, a certificate expiring. These are the ones worth ruling out first because they are fixable immediately.

Seasonality. Everybody forgets this. Roofing in midsummer, heating in spring. Compare to the same month last year rather than to last month.

How to tell them apart

Go to Search Console Performance and set the range to 16 months.

• Overnight cliff, specific date. Technical fault or an update. Check Manual actions, then check whether your pages are still indexed.
• Gradual slide over weeks. Competitors, or content going stale. No single cause, no single fix.
• One page lost everything, the rest fine. That page specifically. Did it change? Did its address change? Did somebody better publish something on the same subject?
• Impressions held, clicks fell. Not a ranking problem. Something is answering above you, which is a different conversation.
• Same shape as last year. Seasonality. Do nothing.

The five minute version of ruling out a fault

Before concluding anything, check these four, in this order. All are free and all take a minute.

1. Manual actions and Security issues in Search Console
2. Your robots.txt, for a Disallow that should not be there, which is the single most expensive line of text in this industry
3. The Pages report, for a sudden rise in pages excluded or not indexed
4. The site itself, loaded on a phone, in case it is simply broken

A surprising share of catastrophes end at step two or four, and both are things somebody changed rather than something Google did.

If you do have one

Read the notice properly, because it names the problem.

Fix the thing it describes, genuinely rather than cosmetically. Then submit a reconsideration request saying what was wrong, what you did, and what will stop it recurring.

It takes weeks. A request that says you fixed it without describing what you fixed gets rejected, and each rejection costs you more weeks.

The part worth being careful about

"You have a penalty, we can remove it" is one of the oldest cold-call scripts in this industry, and it works because a traffic drop is frightening and the check is not well known.

Anyone can see your manual actions status in a minute if you give them access. Anyone claiming to know you have been penalised without that access is guessing, and usually selling.

If your traffic has dropped and you want to know what actually happened rather than what somebody wants to sell you, that is what an audit is for. The Manual actions check is free and you can do it yourself in the next sixty seconds.