mat t hewwo o dward.co .ukhttp://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/tips/how-to-check-which-google-algorithm-update-penalised-your-site/

Matthew Woodward

How To Check If Your Website Has A Google Penalty

In the last couple of weeks we have seen a total of 5 Google algorithm updates. This has certainly lef t a lot ofpeople’s sites in tatters as traf f ic and earnings have dropped of f a clif f overnight.

Historically Google have lef t a decent amount of t ime between updates so you can get a grip of what’s goingon, but not this t ime.

5 updates in less than 2 weeks has created a huge amount of hysteria and f ear amongst webmasters –something the web spam team are becoming an expert at.

So with all the mayhem the updates have caused, how are you meant to know where to start?

Identifying The Penalty

If you suspect your site was hit with a Google penalty af ter an update then you need to identif y whichalgorithm change took your site out.

Once you know which penalty your site got slapped with it is a lot easier to analyse in detail and create a planof action to recovery.

Unf ortunately a lot of webmaster make assumptions at this stage and start f ixing things that aren’t actuallybroken, of ten making things worse.

Accurately diagnosing which penalty is at play is essential to recovering your site.

Where To Start

The f irst thing you should do is see if your drop in rankings/traf f ic correlates with any new Google algorithmupdates.

SEOMoz Change Hisotry

SEOMoz maintain a very helpf ul page that lists all of the major updates, the date they happened along withsome additional inf ormation about the update.

This page gets updated quite regularly and is always a good point of ref erence.

If you are seeing strange movements in the SERPS and that page hasn’t being updated, then you should havea look at the MozCast f or the day.

Mozcast is a great tool that represents the turbulence in rankings in weather terms. The higher thetemperature, the more f luctuation the rankings have seen that day.

This is a good way to check if an update is rolling out at the current t ime.

Chartelligence

Chartelligence is a Google Chrome extension that allows you to overlay data onto graphs in Google Analyticsor Quantcast.

You can choose to display a variety of inf ormation that includes Google Panda, Penguin and other algorithmicupdates.

Not only that, but by def ault you can also display inf ormation such as public holidays, economic activit ies and arange of other key dates throughout the year.

How to Use Chartelligence

The f irst t ime I used Chartelligence it took me quite a while to work out how to get it to actually display the datawithin Analytics.

So with that in mind I decided to write a quick how to.

Step 1 – Install Chartelligence

Make sure your using the Google Chrome browser and install the Chartelligence extension.

Step 2 – Viewing The Data

To overlay the data onto your Google Analytics graph, login to Analytics and then viewyour organic search traf f ic only.

Look closely at the graph and you will see a litt le light bulb symbol with a black andgreen background. Click on that and then select each set of data you want to overlayand click update.

Step 3 – Customised Overlays

You can also add your own custom data points to overlay at the click of a button. Forexample you might want to track site changes and be able to overlay site changes overtraf f ic or conversion graphics at the click of a button.

To do this you need to create an account (completely f ree) and set it up in the Google Chrome extension.

Then all you need to do is click on Create New Layer and select a topic and subtopic. In the example below Ihave created a new topic called Site Updates and a subtopic of General. You can choose to make these publicor private as well.

Next click on Add Event on your newly created layer and assign a tit le, description and date. For example if youadded Facebook Comments to your site on the 3rd of October it would look like this-

Once you have added a f ew events you can jump back over to Google Analytics and see how changes to thewebsite have af f ected traf f ic, conversion, goal completion etc

Pretty cool huh? You could add overlays f or pretty much anything you want – you could even use it to trackyour link building. If you use a lot of services you could add a ref erence point to see how that af f ected yoursearch traf f ic etc.

Panguin Tool

The Panguin Tool combines the data f rom the SEOMoz change history page with your Google Analytics graph.

It isn’t as f lexible as Chartelligence as you can only see Google updates and how they af f ected your searchtraf f ic but it ’s great to quickly check if an update has af f ected your site.

There is no need to install anything, all you need to do is login with your Analytics account and grant thePanguin Tool access to the data.

As soon as you have done that and selected your website you can see this-

The red lines are Panda related, blue lines are Penguin related and Orange lines are general updates to thealgorithm.

What I really like about this over Chartelligence is that when you mouse over each update you get a bitinf ormation about it as well as a link to get more inf ormation.

Next Steps

Once you have isolated which Google penalty is potentially af f ecting your site you can start to analyse thecause of the problem.

Remember that correlation of your search traf f ic dropping with an algorithm update doesn’t necessarily mean itis the update at f ault, f or example your site may have being hacked and hosting malware.

If a drop in your traf f ic does correlate with an algorithm change then that should point you in the right direction

of what to look at f irst as a cause.

Many webmasters set of f in the wrong direction f rom the get go, so make sure you take time to understandwhy the site dropped bef ore taking any action.

If you think the penguin update is to blame then analyse your backlinks, if you think its Panda then do a f ull onsite audit looking f or duplicate content and site structure.