Tips on spotting Google SEO penalties

An expert has offered advice on how to identify instances where Google has penalised a website in organic search rankings.

Ann Smarty of Search Engine Journal said marketers should look out for a sudden decline in Google referral traffic or major rankings for both their overall sites and individual pages.

A penalty may also be in place if there are massive differences in rankings when searches are conducted on Google.com and via a separate database, Ms Smarty explained.

If a search for [yourdomain.com] does not bring up the website in question, Google is likely to have penalised that site, while failing to rank for a [site:yourdomain.com] search can mean that the website is in big trouble, the expert said.

"This flag is the most dangerous one: it might mean some dramatic error on your side (you might have mixed something up with Robots.txt, robots meta tags or redirects) or you might have done something really bad," she explained.

Those wishing to submit a reconsideration request to Google after being banned from the search engine will need to do so through Google Webmaster Tools.