How do you identify and fix a Google Penaly?

[dewalds86]

I would like to know what steps you need to take in order to find out what google penalty your website has been hit with.

Just to be clear I am not talking about manual penalties that you can check in google search console. I am specifically referring to google algorithm updates.

For example if you have been hit by panda, penguin, hummingbird or mobile gedon how would you identify and fix it.

[vangogh]

First, algorithm updates aren't penalties. If you think you lost search traffic because of an algorithm change, spend some time understanding what the change was about and adjust accordingly.

Panda was designed to identify low quality or thin sites so build a quality site. Provide useful or entertaining content and continue to create more. Don't take shortcuts.

Penguin was designed to identify spammers, mainly link buyers and sites that joined link networks. Don't get involved with artificial linking schemes.

Hummingbird was designed to better understand language and context. If you build a quality site you should be good here. Also don't stuff keywords onto the page. The idea is that Google can understand more about language. It can understand that tv and television are the same thing so you can use both words on the same page instead of always forcing one of them.

Mobilegddon was designed to identify sites that work well on mobile devices so make sure you follow good practices and build a site that works well on phones and tablets and other devices. Basically build a responsive site.

Again none of those things are penalties. You really don't have to pay attention to any of them specifically. If you think about the people visiting your sites and build your site in a way that makes real people want to visit and gives them a good experience while they're on your site, you generally won't have to worry when Google makes changes to their algorithm.

[Harold Mansfield]

If you're talking about SEO penalties, there is no way to check. You're either doing it according to Google guidelines (or at least not doing things they say NOT to do) or you're not.

For all other website issues that could affect your ranking like coding errors, malware, blocked pages, not responsive, a high amount of 404 errors and hundreds of other things you can see errors in your Google Webmaster console, and in Google Analytics provided your site is set up with them.

[vangogh]

Oddly enough a pretty good post explaining Penguin (https://yoast.com/google-penguin-explained/) came through my feed reader today. It's a lot more detailed than anything I said above. I guess you can consider Penguin something of a penalty. It's not always being run and it applies a negative score to links that were paid for and otherwise not earned.